


you looked at death in a tarot card (and you saw what you had to do)

by SashaSea (SHCombatalade)



Series: high up in the hills of california [1]
Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Teen Wolf (TV) Fusion, Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Developing Relationship, Families of Choice, Gen, M/M, Male Friendship, Male-Female Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-01
Updated: 2020-02-20
Packaged: 2020-03-08 23:28:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 48,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18904843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SHCombatalade/pseuds/SashaSea
Summary: “Somebody wants me dead?” There must have been something far deeper than his bones damaged, something broken in his brain or even his DNA, because the thought only makes Neil grin a little wider. “That’s nothing new.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Flowerparrish](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flowerparrish/gifts).



> i had a blast writing this and i am in love with the universe created here and like, damn it's been a wild six months. happy birthday my bestest dude, ilu <333
> 
> full disclaimer: if you're here for a true teen wolf au, or if you like, have opinions on teen wolf, i literally watched the first season and a half on netflix just to be able to write this fic so it's like..... the most basic of au concepts I'M SORRY

This is how it starts.

It starts with a goodbye.

* * *

“Hello?” Wymack’s voice is gruff with distraction, hard like his work, but he must know who’s calling because it softens almost immediately. “Everything okay?” And no, it’s not – it’s _really_ not, because he’s probably sitting in his office right now, squinting eyes at his desk of papers because he’s too proud to admit that he might finally need glasses, and Neil—

Neil all but chews a hole through his lip, digs fingernail crescents into his palms, to keep from letting out the soft whining noise he can feel in his throat; he knows even a hint of it will have Wymack on his feet, keys in hand and ready to race to the rescue. “Thank you for everything, Dave,” he manages. It’s too much and not enough, the last words he’s ever going to say to him and it’s _not enough_ ; there’s a year and half of explanations that Neil owes him and a year and a half of lies he owes apologies for. “You were the best,” he says instead, because if he says anything else at all he’s going to say far too much, “and I’m sorry.”

He can still hear Wymack’s panic, calling his name and demanding answers he doesn’t fully remember how to give, when he passes the phone to Kevin.

It’s been years since the last time he cried. Probably since his mom left, or maybe even longer ago than that – Neil thinks maybe he’d forgotten how to cry somewhere around the time he’d forgotten how not to be afraid, and had spent the years since hoping he would never need to remember. Still, when Kevin looks over with sad eyes, shoulders sagging from a similar weight left from a similar conversation, he thinks if any time was going to be the time for it, it would be now. “I also called Mom,” he says when he hands Neil his phone back, like he’ll ever need it again. Neil sucks in a slow breath through his teeth – at least Abby knows. At least she’ll have someone to blame when her boys don’t come home tomorrow, some focus for her fury, something to land fists against for killing her children.

Someone other than herself, at least.

Maybe Abby will finally tell Wymack. Neil doesn’t care what anymore, whether she tells him it’s not his fault or she tells him about werewolves – Neil doesn’t care. Whatever truth she chooses, maybe she’ll tell him.

Maybe he’ll believe her.

“You can still run.” Andrew’s presence is heavy at his back, fingers hooked roughly in the collar of his sweatshirt, and suddenly Kevin’s attention is focused anywhere but at them. “No one would blame you.”

It’s so obviously a lie that it manages a small grin from Neil. “You would,” and Andrew’s face goes tight in the way it does when he’s gone completely bullheaded determined about not smiling back. “I would too.” The words are raw, scraping his throat painfully on the way out; probably because they’re the truth. The truth is, Neil is human – soft and weak and this isn’t his fight, has _never_ been his fight, and right now the only thing keeping him from turning around and walking away from it all is the stupid, human part of him that is willing to throw away his own life, to shatter his family’s life without even the decency of an explanation, all because he’s too goddamn stubborn to admit that maybe, just maybe, this is something he _can’t_ do.

That maybe, just maybe, he doesn’t belong here.

In the quiet reflection of a final evening, Neil admits to himself that he’s never belonged here. That he’s followed along in the wake of something far bigger than himself for years, insisting on playing games too far out of his league, because Kevin belongs here and he belongs with Kevin. Because he didn’t want him to be alone, and because for so long the only thing they had was each other.

Only now Kevin has _this_ as well, all of it. He’s got Jean and Andrew and Robin and Erik, and even though she’s not here tonight – even though she hasn’t been here in a lot of nights, too many nights now – he’s got Thea too. And all Neil has got is late nights with old books, too many lies, an adopted father who used to trust him and an empty house that used to feel like home.

But he’s also still got Kevin, who finally looks at him again like he actually expects him to leave – they all do, Neil realizes, glancing around at the group that refuses to meet his eyes by varying degrees. They genuinely think, after every bullshit thing he’s stuck by them for, he’s going to leave _now_. Because yeah, okay, maybe Neil has never _belonged_ here, but he’s here anyway. Always has been. And yeah, okay, maybe Kevin is all he has, but he’s all Kevin has too. And they’re all the others have, they’re all any of them has anymore, and it hits him then that maybe that’s what pack – that concept that he’s spent too many nights obsessing over, the word that sticks in the back of his throat like a bad cough, the idea of a unit he can never quite be part of but tries so hard anyway – really is. “Fuck you, Kev, and try not to die. And Andrew, try to keep _me_ from dying.”

Andrew shakes him by the grip on the back of his shirt again, softer, and Neil doesn’t actually think he was being tested but he’s pretty sure he passed. “Always do.” It’s the simplicity that freezes him, the easy sureness of the words, like he’s never considered anything else – like he’s never been the one to be threatening Neil with bodily harm half of the time. He says it like it means something, Neil doesn’t know what, but it’s a good motivator because now he refuses to die until he can find out what that something is.

They say their goodbyes – not to each other. That feels a little too much like admitting defeat. But if a few of them hug, and if the hugs get a bit teary? Well, there’s no one around to blame them – and they go to face death.

* * *

Death is not exactly what Neil was  expecting. Death is apparently called Riko, and he’s just about Neil’s size and maybe a year or two older.

He is also creepy as hell.

He emerges from the forest – literally emerges, suddenly appearing in a spot where there had been nothing just a second before – looking just this side of a horror movie cliché, a youthful face with eyes the color of blood and bare feet stained in mud and rust, and the first thing he does is curl his lip like he’s only just scented the foulest stench that the world has to offer.

Five more emerge behind him: a very large man who looks as though he were a hardened killer before he was, well, a hardened killer; a woman about Erik’s age who is missing an eye still looks like a running contender for the meanest motherfucker around; a man in his thirties who looks like he’s stepped right off the set of a _Portlandia_ slasher movie parody; and one – two? – A blur in the fog resolves itself into a mirror image of twins that has Andrew’s spine tensing like it might snap in half, one female to the other’s male, wearing necklaces made of teeth.

Human teeth.

Neil hides the shiver that runs down his spine with a nervous twitch of his hands, and as one, all six of them begin to laugh.

“Really?” Riko’s got a youthful voice as well, soft and innocent, and it almost makes the image even worse. “A human? You brought along a _human_?” It only has them laughing harder, the tears at the corner of their eyes laughter that has the twins leaning against the other for support, and Neil admits for the second time in under an hour that maybe, just maybe, it was a terrible decision for him to come.

But Kevin just snarls out “he’s _pack_ ” and the others growl like they’re not afraid and definitely not like they’re about to die, and Neil thinks it’s very appropriate that the very first time he actually _feels_ like one of them, like pack, it’s the very last thing he’s ever going to feel.

It stops the laughter fairly immediately. “You’re serious,” the one-eyed wolf asks, incredulous, and she sizes Neil – as much of him as there is, that is – up from across the field. “ _That_ is pack? What is it, your _pet_?”

The male twin ducks his head down to brush his temple against his sibling’s. “Do you think it does any tricks?”

The female grins and runs her hand fondly along the string of molars that dangles across her collarbones. “I think that we can make it.”

The thing is – this is hardly the first time Neil has found himself on the sticking end of a werewolf’s sharp derision, and chances are it won’t be the last. It’s more that he’s been completely bored of it since that first time and, well, at this point he’s got nothing left to lose.

Neil throws a rock at them.

Not a large rock, something about the length of his thumb and smooth from the river, so it doesn’t do much in the way of wounding; it bounces off of the male twin’s chest harmlessly and clatters to the ground, but the forest is suddenly very, _very_ still. Deathly still. Still only for the six pairs of tinged-feral eyes that train entirely on him and him alone, and in that very moment he knows that he is going to die tonight. He’s not going to go home, so he may as well go big.

“Fetch,” he sneers at them.

Jean breaks into hesitant, hysterical giggles that last the entire two seconds it takes for Riko’s feral pack to devolve into a snarling mess, filling the air with murder and malice and imminent demise and leave Jean cringing like he’s been slapped. It knocks the others back a step too, all except for Kevin and Andrew, but even they show the effort it takes not to in the tells Neil knows to look for – Kevin’s hand spasms and Andrew’s shoulders curl, and maybe they’re the alphas but they’re also just kids. It’s Neil – stupid, human Neil who submits to _no one_ – who locks eyes with Riko and refuses to avert his stare.

“Run home, little fox,” Riko’s voice is soft and low and dangerous. “This isn’t your place.”

Neil can’t help it; he smiles, sweet as he can, and leans a fraction of an inch closer. “Yours either, fuckface.” Sometimes he wonders if maybe, just _maybe_ , he should spend even half as much time running as he does running his mouth. He might have better odds of surviving.

Riko’s almond-shaped, dried-blood eyes widen fractionally, his eyebrow twitching just slightly in an upward direction, and though he’s tried so hard to remain a closed book he gives everything away when he addresses Andrew personally. “Did... did he just _challenge_ me?”

Andrew’s shoulders loosen, bit by bit, as his arms come to cross over his chest. His entire stance relaxes, easy and confident, as the others range themselves in a tight half circle at his back. “Yeah,” he agrees with that same strange sureness of earlier, the one that leaves Neil feeling warm and almost fond, “he tends to do that.”

“Cute.” Before any of them can blink Riko is right inside their lines, claws around Neil’s throat, and it takes Jean and Erik _and_ Seth to barely hold Kevin back – they’re supposed to talk, they said, they only wanted to _talk_ , and they had recognized the promise for the threat it was but Andrew keeps saying there are _rules_ that are supposed to be followed, and until one pack directly attacks the other the only weapon they’re supposed to use are their words. He squeezes, just enough to hurt, and leans his face as close as he can to whisper in Neil’s ear. “First, I’m going to disembowel everyone you’ve ever loved. Then I’m going to chase you down, little fox, chase you down until you collapse from exhaustion, and then I am going to cut you apart, bit by bit, and laugh when you beg me to stop.”

He’s known for most of his life that his mouth was going to get him in trouble one day; that day, apparently, is today. “Good,” Neil purrs, licking his lips and pressing into the grip against his throat, “I like it rough.” It throws Riko, just for a moment, a blink of time where his face goes loose and slack like he’s not entirely sure what’s happening anymore, until it hardens again and he throws Neil as hard as he can into a very solid tree.

There’s a sickening crunch, and then there’s growling and snarling and screaming and then it goes very, _very_ silent.

* * *

Someone is pinning him down.

He can feel hands on his shoulders, the hard ground at his back, and he’s not sure if it’s still Riko or if it’s one of the others – Lola or Ramon or one of the twins – and a scream sticks like barbed wire in his throat. They’ve killed all the others and now they’ve come back to finish him off. It’s only instinct that has him fighting back, thrashing and kicking and he may be going to die but he’s not going to make it easy for them, and then the hands lift away and Andrew is snarling “knock it the fuck off, Josten, _jesus_ ” and—

He’s safe.

Somehow, _impossibly_ , he is safe.

Also alive.

He has about one second of consciousness to appreciate just how _neat_ that is before the darkness claims him again, only this time it feels less like dying and more like falling asleep.

* * *

When Neil is finally able to crawl back to the world of the living it’s twelve hours later and he’s in a hospital, and Wymack is sitting next to his bed looking like he’s aged at least another ten years, face drawn tight and eyes pinched. The monitors must give him away because he only just recognizes the image before he’s being pulled into a tight, teary hug – Neil’s never been much for hugging, especially not in the seven years since he’s lived as Wymack’s son, but the press of arms around him and Wymack’s chest against his cheek feel a little bit like coming home, and he thinks that maybe this time might be okay. “I am so sorry,” he babbles around the bubble in his chest and the pain that blooms in every cell of his body, “I am so fucking sorry,” and then he can’t form any words at all.

For a few solid minutes, Wymack does nothing but hold him. It’s not until his tears stop and Neil’s body stops shaking that he finally allows him some space, and only then to take Neil’s bruised and broken face very gently in his hands. “Next time,” he says in a voice that is too stern to be a father but too soft to be a sheriff, “something like this comes up, _please_ tell me.”

Neil has barely survived _this_ time to want to even consider a next time, but he also has become very aware of what his life is like. There’s always a next time. “I will, Dave. I promise.”

“I’m serious, Neil.” There’s the police officer, precise and professional. “You tell me everything. Don’t make me hear it from Andrew Minyard again.” Maybe it’s the drugs, or the catastrophic injuries, or maybe there was some head trauma he hasn’t yet realized but Neil would have sworn that Wymack said _Andrew_. That Andrew talked to him. And there’s something else there, waiting in the unspoken breaths between words, the places Neil normally hides himself but when he tries to focus the whole conversation goes swimmy and blurry at the edges – definitely the good drugs, then. He wills a quiet thanks to wherever Abby is. “Neil. _Everything_.”

And there it is.

Their great unspoken something.

 _Everything_.

Neil takes a breath, and then he tells him. “It all started that night you found a body in the woods…”

* * *

“So,” is all Wymack says when Neil finishes. “Kevin’s a werewolf.” It’s not a question. He doesn’t stumble over the word, doesn’t raise an eyebrow at it, doesn’t treat it like something real or fake or anything at all really. His voice is completely blank, like whatever parts of him that are a recognizable personality, that make him the person he is – smart, stubborn streak, soft spot for kids and animals and women with big blue eyes – have been scraped away raw.

Neil flinches. “Yep.”

And then he’s Wymack again, considering Neil with the curious intensity he’d first met him with. “Are _you_ a werewolf?”

Although it pains him to do so, Neil snorts. He can’t help it. The man has just found out that werewolves are not only very real but compromise about eighty percent of the people his sons encounter on a regular basis and exactly one-third of the people living in his house, his own child included, found out when one or six of them nearly killed his adopted son, and his pressing concern is whether or not there’s one more to add to the mix. He’s either in shock or he thinks that Neil has finally lost it, that he’s out of his mind or that he’s too far into the morphine drip. “If I was, do you think I’d be lying here with – what actually is the damage? All I know is that I get the good stuff,” and he shrugs the arm with the IV in it.

Wymack sighs. “Five broken ribs. Broken leg. Broken arm. Broken collar bone. Three fractured discs. Punctured lung. Grade two concussion. Four facial lacs with about a hundred and eight stitches between them.” He recites the words like a mantra, like something memorized, and a fresh wave of guilt hits Neil right in the gut over what Wymack must have been through since their middle of the night phone calls of ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘I love you’ and then no word at all until Andrew Minyard – Andrew _goddamn_ Minyard, accused murderer – told him that Neil was in the hospital. “History of causing premature balding and grey hairs in parental figures.” When Neil glances up, Wymack shoots him a tiny wink.

“Very funny,” and the laugh is as dry as his throat; Wymack hands over a cup of water without being asked – he’s a little bit of a pro at hospitals by now.

“Werewolves.” It’s still not a question.

Yeah, Neil understands the feeling. “I know it’s a lot, and I know it’s ridiculous and that it sounds like I’m making it up, or maybe you just _hope_ I’m making it up, I’ve been there. But trust me, it’s real. And it’s not just the drugs—”

“No,” Wymack sighs, “no, it makes sense.” When he runs a hand through his hair and down his face, he comes away looking _tired_. “A lot of sense. I’ve actually been thinking it was something like that.”

“Something like _werewolves_?” Neil jerks, first in an attempt to sit up and then again from the violent waves of pain and nausea that assault him at the first signs of movement. “Who thinks something weird is going on with their kids and goes right to _werewolves_?”

For all that he’s faced down death and at least one alpha werewolf with a smile, the glare Wymack pins him back down to the bed with leaves Neil feeling cold and cowed. “The sort of person who had access to the same police reports you did, which is an entirely different conversation we will be having at a later time, which led them to the same conclusions as you. Just took me a little longer, is all.” Neil understands that a lot of people think Wymack is – not _stupid_ , just not smart, not in a book way, like maybe he’s a small town sheriff because he couldn’t be anything else – like he’s mostly gun smart and law smart and sports smart, but no. Wymack is sharp. He’s clever. He sees everything and remembers everything and he apparently found out about werewolves, all his own, over the course of a murder investigation.

Neil is suddenly, _achingly_ , proud of him.

“Dobson one too?” It floors Neil, the sudden knowledge that he’s spent seven years severely underestimating this man.

“No,” he chews the truth into the ragged cuticles of his left hand, “but she knows about all this.” There’s a weight lifting from his chest and he feels better than he has in months, despite the significant damage to his body, because all of the lies he’s been holding like puppet strings, all of the walls they built between Neil and Wymack and the rest of the family – they’re gone. “So does Abby – don’t be mad at her, we made her promise. Thea’s family, they’re sort of... it’s complicated. Allison knows. Seth too, unfortunately.”

Wymack nods along with each new name added to the list like he’s confirming things he already knows. “And Kevin – _Kevin_ – is a werewolf? For sure?” Sometimes it’s hard for Neil to deal with too. It’s hard to understand if you’ve seen him trip over his own feet or have an asthma attack or hide behind the couch at their eighth birthday party because he was afraid of the clowns but—

“Yeah, he really is.” Wymack sighs again and rubs his face, and Neil tries a peace-offering in a tiny smile. “He’s _way_ better at it now than he used to be. Trust me.”

This time when Wymack nods it’s on the last two words like maybe, for the first time in nearly two years, he does.

* * *

Wymack goes home for a quick shower and a forced nap after they’ve finished talking, only because he’d worked through the night and spent the morning and afternoon and into the evening as well at the hospital fretting over Neil; he already has to be back at work in a few hours. Still, perhaps finally aware of the evils in the world – or at least confirmed to awareness of them – he lingers in the doorway of Neil’s private room like he has no intention of actually leaving. It’s only when the door opens from the other side to admit Kevin with a strained smile and a stumbling greeting that he finally does go, nodding a gruff mix of hello and goodbye and the assumption that Kevin is there so that Neil won’t be left alone.

Neil grins around the muddled haze of pain and medication. “You look like shit.”

Kevin doesn’t say a single word in response, doesn’t do anything but throw his arms around Neil as gently as he can and curl on the free side of the bed, face hidden in the crook of Neil’s undamaged shoulder. It lasts just long enough that Neil genuinely can’t tell if he’s pretending to be too macho to let Neil see that he’s crying or if this is some latent werewolf scenting thing, but he doesn’t make fun of him for either. Instead he returns the hug as best his bandages will allow and marvels at the man his baby-faced basically brother has grown into. After about twenty minutes of reassuring himself that Neil is neither dead nor actively dying, Kevin releases the octopus-like tangle he has over Neil’s limbs. “You’re a fucking idiot.”

“Yep.”

“You could have _died_.”

“Definitely.”

“I was really worried about you.”

“Good.”

The cracks in Kevin’s armor start at the corner of his lips, quivering with the effort it takes not to tilt up into a grin. “You were totally a badass back there,” he finally exclaims, and it’s all Neil can do to mutter a sleepy _fuck yeah I was_ against the warmth of Kevin’s side before Kevin launches into a detailed play-by-play of how the night had followed. He glosses over the terrible bits, like how he’d heard just how close Neil had come in the too many seconds it took for his heartbeat to stagger forward after he’d hit. Like how Riko had dragged his broken body by the face over to them as a taunt. Like how Jean had nearly lost his arm and how Erik’s throat was half torn open, and how they were healing but _slowly_ , so slowly, because they had gotten their asses well and truly kicked by a pack of near-feral wolves who cut their eyeteeth on blood and mayhem. He doesn’t tell Neil why he’s limping or why one pupil is blown and the other isn’t, doesn’t tell him why Robin hadn’t waved from the hallway but had winced when she’d tried or why Erik has been trying to send him a text for an hour now and getting nothing but the eternal . . . bubble instead, doesn’t mention Seth at all except that he’s still alive.

He doesn’t linger over the injuries or the bloodshed or the pain and Neil’s grateful for that, because even though he’d spent the majority of the last week imagining what it could be, what it _would_ be, the reality of it is much, much worse.

“But we won, right?”

Kevin smiles at him for real this time, but it’s like he’s been hit with a dimmer switch. “We survived. That counts, right?”

Almost. “And the others?”

The sheets crinkle beneath Kevin’s absent-minded fist and the blanket falls victim to his distracted fingers, threads pulled in all directions as he tests the weave; he fidgets when he’s tired, or when he’s lying, or when he’s scared. “They just pulled back and ran off. Not ran away, it was just like they… left. We have no idea why. Riko,” he catches a loose piece of yarn on one of his chewed cuticles and neatly shreds it. “Riko said he would be back. He said he had a promise to keep.”

Neil swallows the rough sandpaper feeling in his throat – not safe then, just alive. He’d taken for granted the fact of his survival, taken it to mean that they had won the day. Instead, they’ve only not lost everything. Yet. His stomach lurches, bile rising, and he hasn’t eaten in over a day now but he can feel every part of him rebelling because he’s finally pissed off the wrong person and now he’s got a crazed werewolf sworn to hunt him down wherever he went, whoever he was with. “Great. So, standing appointment between now and whenever, then?” Kevin pinches his lips grimly and runs a hand gently down Neil’s arm.

And then they stop talking about it entirely, they just curl together and watch shitty evening television together, and Kevin lets Neil eat the green jell-o _and_ half of his cheeseburger because they are alive and they are together and, right now, that’s all that matters.

It’s long past midnight when Abby comes to collect him, half-asleep and drooling into Neil’s pillow, and his nose is cold when he plants a sloppy kiss on his cheek. “Love you, Neil.”

“Love you, Kevin.”

He drifts off to sleep to Abby’s familiar, mothering touch against his forehead.

* * *

It’s sometime far more into the dead of night when Andrew sits carefully on the edge of the bed on Neil’s uninjured side. He’s shaking like a leaf and, going by the fact that the entrance woke Neil up, not moving as steadily as he usually does; he’s obviously injured, but with the room as dark as it is there’s no way for Neil to try and catalogue the damage – and not all wounds, he reminds himself, can be seen. “Hey,” Neil stills him with a hesitant touch to his forearm, because for all that half of the time they’re at each other’s throats – occasionally literally – they’re friends, better friends than either of them would like to admit, and Neil _gets it_. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not,” he aims for, and misses, his usual growl – it’s easy to forget how young he is sometimes, given that he’s their pack leader and some measure of an adult figure in their lives, but he’s barely out of high school himself. Even Erik, who is not Andrew’s uncle but refers to himself as such, is still a few years shy of thirty. – and falls somewhere around petulant instead. “No one is, and I can’t – I can’t. You all need to be more careful in the future.” He’s looking at the television in the corner, early morning infomercials playing with volume on mute, and pretending this isn’t one of the most serious conversations they’ve ever shared. “ _You_ need to be more careful.”

The pain meds have done their job just well enough for Neil to understand – he doesn’t belong in this world, and Andrew’s let him tag along this far but, as tonight only proved that they’ve already known, he’s a major liability. _Be more careful_ he says, but Neil knows he means _don’t fuck up_ – as if the eleven broken bones and the throbbing in his skull wasn’t enough of a reminder. “I know.”

The responding glare cannot be seen in the darkness, but Neil feels it anyway. “No, Neil, you _don’t_ know. You’re—” In the blink of an eye it takes the following sentence to form Neil has already written an entire laundry list of disparaging words that he expects Andrew to use. An idiot. An instigator. The weak link. A _human_ , and he won’t mean it like an insult but he’ll say it like one, pain and protectiveness turning the word over like a weapon to test the sharpest edge. “—terrifying.” Neil blinks. “If it had been you,” he continues absently, “I think _you_ would have been the alpha.”

Neil is absolutely sure that Andrew does not intend it as a compliment, but he takes it as one – maybe the best he’s ever received. This time the tightness in his chest has nothing to do with cracked ribs and everything to do with the way Andrew has finally admitted that he maybe values Neil a little bit. “But you’re not,” he’s just as quick to add, and twice as vehement about it. “You’re a human, and a fucking stupid one at that, and you’re going to get yourself killed.” Frustration and fury radiate from Andrew, from the tight lines of his shoulder to the tenuous perch he keeps on the spare few inches of mattress he’s allowed himself. “You had me promise to keep you from dying. Step one, _stop challenging strange wolves_.”

Neil can’t help the instantaneous grin he feels pull at his stitches. “Aww, are you _jealous_?” he asks, because apparently eleven broken bones and a near-death experience is not enough of a lesson for Neil to learn about running his mouth, especially to werewolves. But instead of the snarl he expects, Andrew lets out a tiny huff of a sound that could, from anyone else, be a laugh.

“You wish.”

It’s a torturous motion, moving onto his side so he can shift a few extra inches away, but worth it for the way he can feel Andrew relax against the borrowed pillows; he’s gotten better about the careless way the others are with their touching, no longer violent about his personal space, but he’s nowhere near enjoying it either. “So what happened? Why’d Riko pull his prison gang out?”

“They never stay in one place for long.” He can’t be sure, given the darkness and the morphine and the way Andrew has complete control of every part of himself, even his breathing, but it sounds like he might be dozing. “If the local pack puts up too much of a fight they fall back, hit an easier target, and come back stronger.” They’d first gotten word two months ago from an old acquaintance of the Hemmicks up in Bozeman, rumors of a pack of wolves only a step or two up from feral beasts, most of them escaped criminals, who followed a murderous alpha. They swept into territories of newer or smaller packs, savaging the wolves and killing the alphas for their power, and they’d had less than a week’s notice when their path turned towards Beacon Hills. “We just took too long to die.”

“Lucky us.”

“He’ll be back.” Neil hadn’t forgotten so much as just hadn’t wanted to think about it right now, not when he’s finally able to breathe without feeling like he’s sucking on crushed glass. “You challenged him. He’s not going to forget that. He’ll come back and, when he does, he’ll kill you.”

The panic in his chest feels exactly like the pull of his stitches: like he’s trying to come apart. “Great. Thanks for the pep talk.”

Andrew looks down to meet his gaze, which Neil can do even in the darkness with the way his eyes catch the light from the monitors. “He’ll have to kill the rest of us first.” He shouldn’t be smiling when he says things like that, but it’s only the casual promise of their impending murder that has his lips finally curling up – he shouldn’t be smiling and Neil _definitely_ shouldn’t be feeling soft and loopy and morphine drunk returning it. “So don’t worry about it.”

“Somebody wants me dead?” There must have been something far deeper than his bones damaged, something broken in his brain or even his DNA, because the thought only makes Neil grin a little wider. “That’s nothing new.”

Andrew snorts with disgust, and a little bit with delight, and rises from the bed sounding far more like himself. “Go the fuck to sleep.”

He does.

* * *

Seventy-three days later, Wymack forgives them.

Or he doesn’t.

They all try very hard to not talk about it, not really, because there’s so much that they all wish he didn’t have to know. Like how Neil lost his place on the lacrosse team, lost his GPA, lost his guardian’s trust, all because he was giving too much of himself to a werewolf pack he’d never formally been part of. Like how Kevin definitely was. Like how they’ve bent (broken) countless laws, like how they’ve casually thrown out everything they’ve ever been taught about respecting the rules, respecting Wymack’s job, and managed to build themselves a theoretical rap sheet that could put them away, no questions asked, for a very long time. Like how Neil’s after high school plans have gone from college and career to nothing more than preventing a brutal end to himself and everyone he cares about because he managed to piss off a psychopath. Like how they’d called at two in the morning frantic, no explanation, and said their goodbyes because they thought they were going to die.

Like how Neil had almost died.

The point is that seventy-three days after Neil survives, sixty-eight days after he’s released from the hospital, nine days after the stitches and wrappings and bruises are finally mostly gone, Neil and Kevin come downstairs for dinner and Wymack tells them that he’s going to work.

It’s six in the evening. Ever since That Night (capital letter distinction required) Wymack has been a strictly daylight hours only sheriff, managing close to a regular nine-to-five, and instead spent his nights sitting in the living room with the boys and watching television or reading casually at the table while they muddle through homework or research. In the sixty-eight nights that he has been home, Wymack has been in the same room as at least one of them for nearly every moment. It’s another thing they try not to talk about, the way he always sits between them and the windows or doors and the way that he’s taken to wearing his service pistol around the house.

But now it’s nighttime, or close to it, and he’s going to work. Neil has already spent the last seventy-three days (the last one year, eight months, and twenty-six days) feeling guilty for what he’s put the man who has only shown him kindness through. Guiltier still for never coming to him with any of it, as though he couldn’t – didn’t – trust him. But it’s not until the moment that Wymack tells them he’s leaving for the night, that he’s going to drive away and leave his sons alone in the darkness and pretend that maybe tonight they won’t get involved with murders or monsters, pretend that they won’t find the nearest danger and head toward it, that he thinks he might finally choke on it all. Wymack says that he’s going to work and all Neil can hear is that he trusts them again, even a little bit.

“Okay,” Neil answers, and he doesn’t cry but his throat gets the scratchy, tight feeling like he might.

Wymack definitely notices, and softens his stance. “I’m dropping you off at Abby’s.”

It’s a toss up as to whether be doesn’t trust _them_ or if he just doesn’t trust their lives, but at least they’re all trying. Kevin nods agreeably – he’s always been closer to Abby than Neil has, probably because he can’t remember a time before Kayleigh had gotten sick. Neil, on the other hand, had grown up with a mother and as much as he loves Abby he sometimes gets so angry at the way she tries to act like he’s looking for a replacement. “Andrew’s?” He asks instead.

The thing is, over the course of decidedly _not_ talking about things over the last few months, they’ve all become very good at talking about them. Neil says _Andrew’s_ like it’s a question Wymack can say no to, and Wymack hears _Andrew’s_ as a correction of where Neil will be going regardless. But he nods his head slowly like he acknowledges that it’s probably the safest place to leave either of them – like he refuses to acknowledge that he doesn’t actually hate any of the wolves, and like he refuses to acknowledge that he has maybe almost come to accept their near constant presence in his house and his sons’ lives – and reaches for his keys.

Logically it probably _is_ safest at Andrew’s. Even if Riko was of a mind to return so soon and completely eliminate the element of surprise, the threat of suspense, the _torture_ of the unknown, he wouldn’t be stupid enough to attack the local alpha in his home. Ingrained societal rules aside, the seat of the pack tended to be heavily defended by wolves and weapons alike, and sometimes even magic. It’s safe and, with everything that’s happened, Neil wants to feel safe.

He also sort of wants to kick Andrew’s ass.

(He _wants_ a lot of things. He wants his life back – his previous lonely, lame life filled with quiet nights of studying and video games and too many sugary snacks. His stupid, boring, petty life with a stupid spot on the lacrosse team and a boringly comfortable GPA and a petty hold on Kevin’s entire existence and before he had to time share him with a group of werewolves. He wants to not wake up every thirty or so minutes to check and re-check every entrance to the house, to not know the lunar schedule for the next seventeen months and have his life planned accordingly around it, to not panic at every noise in the dark and to not flinch at every flash of dark hair and almond eyes. He wants Wymack to look at him like he used to, like he did before, when Neil was still his son and not the hardened stranger he’d welcomed into his home.

He wants his mom back. Now more than ever, more than every day of his life since they told him she was gone, he wants his mom back.)

But also he wants to kick Andrew’s ass.

See, in Wymack’s list of unforgiveable acts, at least six belong to Neil. It’s not even the lying, day in and day out, for a year and a half – it’s the way he’s chosen, time and again, to put himself in harm’s way that he knows, just _knows_ , Wymack will never truly get over. And sure, Kevin was there too, but it’s always been harder for them; Kevin was as much Abby’s as he was Wymack’s by now, and frequently spent nights or even days and weeks sometimes at her house. It doesn’t bother Neil, the way Wymack is quicker to forgive Kevin, because he knows as well as Wymack does that Kevin is easier to lose. Neil owns the pain he’s caused his family, owns the at least six but probably much higher number of items on that list that are his.

But Andrew… Andrew called Wymack.

It’s not even a matter of Andrew calling Wymack to inform him that Neil was in the hospital, when Wymack is the sheriff who still halfway thinks that Andrew is a murderer – but he thinks they might have a few words about that part, too. It’s not even a matter of Andrew calling Wymack to tell him about werewolves. No, the real heart of the matter is that Andrew called Wymack and all but guaranteed that he would never fully trust any of them, Kevin and Neil included, when he did.

(In the quiet of the car ride across town, Neil admits that maybe that one also belongs to him.)

* * *

He walks them to the door.

Wymack walks them right up the stairs to the second-floor loft like he belongs there, and then he knocks on the door. Even if Neil _hadn’t_ texted from the car, a room full of werewolves would have known they were coming from at least a half a mile away – and he _knows_ Wymack knows this because he’s seen it, seen the way Kevin will casually mention that Jean or Robin are on their way only to see them turn the corner at the end of the block through the front window minutes later. Still, he walks them up and he knocks on the door politely, and Andrew opens it – politely. “Sheriff.”

As far as Neil can tell it’s the first time they’ve spoken since that phone call; in all the times Andrew has been by the house with the others, he’s managed to avoid being in the same room as Wymack for all of them. “Mister Minyard,” he manages to drag the first part out like a name, and any other time it would be funny, the way Wymack matches Andrew’s gaze and his posture, subconsciously setting himself as an equal power.

Any other time it would be, but right now Neil is already tired and Wymack is already tired and he’s already going to spend his entire shift too keyed up over leaving them to really be safe, so Neil does what he does best: he puts himself between them, right in the line of fire. “You owe me fourteen grand for hospital bills,” he tells Andrew.

Andrew breaks the stare with Wymack to roll his eyes, shoulders tense. “You owe me seven seventy-eight for pizza.”

Jean hovers awkwardly in the open space beyond the doorway, like he’s still unsure where his place is in any of this, but he smiles weakly when he sees Kevin is also there and offers him a slice of pepperoni. After a moment of thought, he also offers one to Wymack. The polite, but equally unsure, refusal distracts him just long enough that Neil is able to steer the conversation _away_ from a reminder of his injuries, or a question as to what else Andrew might have been involved in. “Robin home?” he leans in uninvited to glance around the living area, and she rises from her seat on the couch beside Erik to give him a loud, chapstick sticky kiss over the scarring on his cheek.

“Come help pick a movie,” she tells him, and grabs his arm before he can move away. “Erik wants to watch _Clueless_ again.”

“It’s a _good movie_ ,” he calls without turning to look, and they all know they’ll let him – it was Nicky’s favorite.

Andrew’s shoulders loosen, but his hands curl into the too-long sleeves of his shirt. “You have my number,” he reminds Wymack, but then his jaw tightens like he’s remembered that’s probably not the best thing to say, to remind him exactly how or why he has that number in the first place. After a pause, he exhales slowly and continues. “If you need anything.”

Wymack nods, equally slowly, as if the conversation they’re actually having is vastly different from the one they’re speaking – and it probably is. “And you have mine.” His teeth clench around the words for much the same reasons. “Anything happens, you call me.” Andrew doesn’t nod, but Wymack does again, and then he turns to Kevin. “I mean it, you call me for anything. Even if Neil just coughs too hard,” and Kevin rolls his eyes but agrees. “Neil! You keep your phone _on_ , you got it?” and it’s another moment of awkwardness – Neil hasn’t let his phone die since the night Kevin was bitten, but the old habit makes a convenient excuse sometimes.

He looks at them again like he wants to say something more, but instead he just zips up his jacket and goes to work.

“So,” Erik sits down on the arm of the sofa later, right beside Neil. He looks at the way Kevin is sitting too close, and he switches to German. “ _How are you feeling_?”

At this exact moment Neil is feeling okay. In general, less so. “ _It still hurts to move_ ,” he admits, and watches the way Andrew’s eyes tighten from across the room. The casts have all come off and the stitches are out but he’s no where close to fully healed; Abby had said another two months _at least_ , had said it with a frown and a pointed stare and the knowledge that he’s not going to listen. Neil has never done well, feeling helpless – it was the majority of his life, trying to conquer that feeling, and no more so than when he swam the up-current struggle of a human who ran with wolves. But the casts... he hadn’t been able to _move_ , would never have been able to flee let alone fight. He still doesn’t have much in terms of standing a chance, but at least now he can pretend. “ _Also I’m pretty much terrified all the time_.”

Kevin watches the exchange with irritation and fondness warring across his face – he doesn’t take to sharing Neil any better than Neil has to sharing him, and he hates when the three of them lapse into a language he doesn’t understand. Erik pats his leg gently. “Yeah,” he says, in English this time. “Sounds about right.”

At Neil’s other side Jean stills; he looks impossibly small and young, like he used to, in a sweater that’s far too large for him and he curls his fingers in the cuffs like a blanket. Neil moves the inch closer it takes for him to lean his head against Jean’s shoulder. He’s never been a tactile person but he’s gotten better at it, with the pack as focused as they are on the comfort of touch. “How’s your arm?”

He makes a fist with his left arm, squeezing a few times, before tucking it back into the stretched-out cave of his sleeve. “Better now. Took a while, though.”

“We got our asses kicked, didn’t we.” It’s less pessimism and more pragmatism at this point, and for all the luck they’d used up this time around there’s no chance of repeating it should a second attack come. Seth had seen that too, and now he— Neil freezes on the name. He was never close to Seth, never even liked him much beyond the necessity, but he misses his presence like a phantom limb, like an ache at the edge of his being that he can’t quite place. It’s worse for the wolves, subconsciously leaving an open space when they meet that he is no longer there to fill. Neil hasn’t seen Allison since it happened (but he hears from her every day, countless times a day, thankful that he and Kevin had managed to convince Wymack to switch over to unlimited texting long before either of them ending up needing it).

Like she knows where his brain is leading, Robin presses her back against Neil’s shins and slides her fingers under the cuffs of his pants. “Yeah,” she whispers, “we did. But we survived.”

It’s become their mantra: we survived. Neil remembers a time when he used to measure in terms of winning and losing and not against the loss of life; sometimes, all of that feels like an entire lifetime ago. _We survived_ , he thinks, and there’s a part of his brain (a part that sounds too much like Seth, echoing words he’d thrown over his shoulder before boarding a bus and disappearing to who knows where) that can’t help but add _this time_.

It slips out without his meaning to. “For now.”

Andrew lingers in the doorway to the kitchen, caught like a shadow between their conversations. “You know we’re not just going to let Riko kill you,” he reminds in that gruff half-growl of his, and maybe he thinks Neil doesn’t remember their talk in the hospital that night because of the drugs he’d been on. Maybe their talk never happened – there were, after all, a _lot_ of drugs involved. But he promises a second time something that probably doesn’t need to be promised at all, and Andrew has never once made them a promise lightly.

Neil’s voice is embarrassingly soft, gentle like that night. “Because you want to be the one to do it, right?”

It should maybe scare him, the way Andrew doesn’t laugh. “Exactly.”

* * *

Lacrosse practice starts back up two weeks before the first day of school; the only reason Neil knows this is because Kevin stomps his way up the stairs to fall heavily on Neil’s bed. “This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”

It catches Neil’s interest only because it’s so laughably ridiculous – the worst things that have ever happened to Kevin have generally landed at least one person in the hospital (and that person is usually Neil) and killed at least twenty-eight people over a span of nearly two years so, perspective. “Really,” he resists the urge to smother Kevin with the pillow he’s buried his face into. “The worst.”

The lump of despair that used to be Kevin nods into the bedding. “The worst.”

It takes every last ounce of Neil’s willpower to not beat him across the skull with the lacrosse stick he still keeps in his room. “ _Really_ , Kev? The worst?” Kevin’s mother finally succumbed to the cancer that she’d fought for three years when Kevin was only eight, leaving him to the nurse who’d cared for her and the sheriff her deathbed confession revealed to be his father. He was bitten by a rogue werewolf and dragged into a supernatural power play where people have literally died. He once thought he killed a man on a bus and he regularly has to worry about killing his friends, even though his friends are almost getting killed without his involvement, and his sort-of ex-girlfriend’s family is composed of psychotic killers bent on hunting him down personally. They all nearly died only four months ago, and could still at any point, and every single part of that has become their new, fucked up version of normal life. “Want to rethink your definition of ‘worst’ there?”

“Neil, I could get cut from the team!”

“Oh my god! Not the team!” Neil drops any pretense of sympathy at that point, and actually does throw something against Kevin’s head – a book, paperback, instead of a racquet, but the sentiment is the same. Kevin had arrived at the first practice only to be told he was on probation, benched until he could pull his grades to a C-average. And Neil, well – Neil knew better than anyone that too many absences or too many failed tests could cost an awful lot for a student athlete. He also seemed to be the only one of their pair who remembered that they had a few things quite a bit more than lacrosse in their lives. Surviving, being a major one of them. “I hate to say fuck the team, but Kevin? Fuck the team.”

Kevin doesn’t bother to look at him, only rolls onto his side so he can more easily growl at him. “You’re only saying that because you got cut,” and Neil is willing to admit that maybe he’s right.

“ _Maybe_. But only because I was cut for a bullshit reason.”

Kevin sighs; it’s an old argument. “Neil, you were cut because you made first line and then never showed up to a game.”

An old argument carrying an old hurt. For all that Neil consistently tells them all that it’s fine, it doesn’t matter, that he’s over it – he’s not. “Which is _bullshit_ because I only missed those games because I was picking up after your fucking drama, remember? All those times you decided that protecting us all from actual werewolves wasn’t _important_ enough for you?” That’s another thing he misses from their pre-wolf life: Kevin and Neil had always held grudges, but never against each other.

“Neil—” This time Kevin sits up, slowly, but still refuses to make eye contact.

Maybe it’s the freshly healed skull fracture. Maybe it’s just a bad day. All Neil knows is that instead of softening at Kevin’s apologetic tone he bristles instead, because he’s tired of everyone in his life treating him as though he’s made of glass when he’s proven time and again the opposite. “I don’t give a fuck, Kevin.” He’s suddenly _angry_ , so angry, like all the frustration he’s felt since that night in the woods is finally boiling to the surface and he doesn’t know why (He does. Allison had called when she’d gotten her early acceptance to Harvard only two days before and Wymack had looked at Neil with those too-old, too-tired eyes and asked ‘do you… do you even have plans for next year?’ and Neil couldn’t answer because he didn’t). “So you might get kicked off the lacrosse team. So you and your girlfriend have to sneak around in the town’s worst kept secret. As far as repercussions go, maybe I’m just failing to see how yours are _the worst_.”

He only realizes how cold his voice had gotten by those final words when Kevin flinches. And he knows it’s not entirely fair – most of his problems have been a result of his own choice. To keep Wymack out of things, to keep himself in, to keep butting his nose into places he clearly should not be. It’s just that sometimes he feels like he’s further sunk into the entire werewolf thing than Kevin, the _actual_ werewolf (and he _hurts_ , even after four months, and he knows it’s not rational but sometimes he is so _furious_ with how Kevin can heal because it’s like he doesn’t understand exactly how much effort Neil goes through just to keep being his best friend). Kevin frowns. “I’m sorry, Neil, that was—”

“Just—” and they’ve fought before, but never quite like this. Neil clings to the way that a drag out fight with his basically brother feels like the most normal thing he’s done with his life in a very long time. Either of them could be dead tomorrow, could be dead a hundred times over, and fighting like this is… pointless. But pointlessness is a luxury, and sometimes the only control Neil has. “Just shut up and leave me the fuck alone, okay?”

Kevin slinks away like a kicked dog, sad eyes and slow steps, all the way down the hall until the door at the end slams shut. It doesn’t make Neil feel any better.

* * *

Andrew taps against the glass of his window a few hours later. Neil wants to still be mad when he goes to open it but he can’t, not with the way Andrew is actually knocking and waiting for permission instead of picking the lock like he usually does. “The sheriff called,” he says instead of hello, and tosses his jacket onto the chair at Neil’s desk. That’s more of a surprise than anything. Wymack has been okay at accepting the fact that nearly all of his son’s friends are werewolves – _okay_ , but not great. He doesn’t bat an eye when any or all of them appear in the house anymore, but he doesn’t relax when they do either. He sits in their presence like he’s ready for action, even when they’re two movies and six pizzas in for the evening, and he’s never once initiated contact with any of them. “Said you and Kevin were fighting.”

Neil isn’t exactly sure when Andrew became the number two person in his life – for a long time it was Wymack, but then there were too many lies and he went to Kevin with absolutely everything he could, and Andrew with everything else. He isn’t sure when that happened and he definitely isn’t sure when Wymack noticed, but he does notice that he feels just a little bit less pathetic to see Andrew. “Kevin and I fight all the time.” It’s not entirely a lie, they _do_ fight all the time, but usually it’s over the remote or what to eat for dinner.

Andrew shrugs like he knows it’s not entirely the truth either. “UC and CSU applications aren’t due until the end of November,” he mentions, and throws the jacket at Neil so he can sit on the chair.

“What?”

“Applications for California State Universities aren’t due until November 30th,” he fixes Neil with one of the familiar stares that tells the world exactly how stupid the thinks Neil currently is. “He thinks you’re feeling guilty for wanting to leave and that’s why you haven’t sent any out.” That’s not entirely a lie either. He _hasn’t_ sent any college applications out, but not out of guilt – mostly it’s out of the fact that he’s not sure he’ll live long enough to ever need to, but that’s not exactly the sort of thing he can tell Wymack about.

“ _What_?”

He gives Neil another of those looks, and this time he can’t but feel like an idiot either but it’s not as though he understands what conversation they’re meant to be having here. “You need to do things with your life. Things that aren’t staying here and waiting to die.” He doesn’t take his boots off before kicking his feet up onto the bed, but Neil doesn’t complain because he also rests them across Neil’s lap. It’s a small point of contact, far less than any of the others would consider important, but it’s one of the first Andrew’s initiated himself. “Otherwise what’s the point of it all.”

Neil grins, only slightly antagonistic. “You’re one to talk.”

“Palmetto State University,” Andrew fires back with an equally smug grin. “I majored in Criminal Justice.”

“Wait, what?”

“What the fuck do you think we were doing in _South Carolina_ for four years?” Neil tries not to think about what the few surviving members of the Hemmick pack might have been up to after the fire, but mostly he thinks they were mourning. “Pissing people off is not going to pay your bills, and neither is saving our asses.” His lips tug around the words like he wants to smile but refuses to let himself and he digs the steel toes of his shoes into the ticklish part of Neil’s ribs, and it’s another one of those Moments (capital letter distinction absolutely required) that leaves Neil feeling confused in the softest possible way.

(The kind that leaves him Feeling, again a required emphasis, anything at all.)

“Chico’s less than an hour away,” Neil tells him instead, because of all of the things in his life he is definitely not thinking about, Andrew and Wymack and Kevin and the complicated web that ties him to all of them, college isn’t actually one of them. “They have an entire library of folklore there.” The next closest is UC Davis, almost two hours south, and he knows both Kevin and Thea have put in their applications with no alternates; he also knows he can’t stand to be that far away if anything happens, either to him or to someone else.

Andrew shrugs, but his shoulders are loose and he looks as close to relaxed as he ever does. “It’s not the worst choice.”

There’s another reason he hasn’t considered being any farther away than he has to. “What about Riko?”

“Neil.” Andrew shifts forward to cup his hand around the back of Neil’s neck, tapping his thumb against the thundering beat of his pulse; every point of contact between them feels like a brand against his skin. “He has to get through me first.”

“Okay.” Neil can hardly swallow, can hardly breathe around the tight feeling in his chest. “Okay.”

Andrew stays to help him fill out the applications, typing away with feigned disinterest on Neil’s laptop; he breaks it only with the sly smile that sprouts across his face when Neil stammers his confusion that Andrew somehow knows both his real name and his social security number. When he finally leaves, a good five hours later, he pauses before he turns to use the door.

* * *

Despite the first day of school marking a countdown to the end – especially for the seniors, now counting down across the months to graduation – it’s an otherwise understated event. He wakes up. Kevin drives them to campus. Neither of them speak.

He manages until lunch, where he’s the first one to reach their usual table in the back of the cafeteria, and the noise of a thousand teenagers actively bragging who had a more extreme summer leaves a ringing in his ears and a twinge in every one of his still healing bones. “It’s weird, isn’t it?” Thea drops onto the bench beside him with a smile; it’s strange, any one-on-one interaction he has with Thea. They’d spent so long not getting along – Neil had never approved of the fact that Thea came from a family bent on eradicating Kevin, and those like him, from the earth, and Thea had somehow interpreted that dislike as resentment over her taking more of Kevin’s time. Fear and jealousy had brought out the worst in both of them – that now it’s hard to remember that they actually _do_.

“The food?” Neil picks at what is meant to be a casserole with disinterest, stomach roiling despite his lack of breakfast as well, and pushes it away. “No weirder than usual.”

Thea laughs at him. “That too,” and she squeezes in closer to open up enough space for Kevin to sit down beside her. “But mostly I meant listening to everyone else after everything we’ve done, and hearing how important these things are to them.” Thea has perfect aim with more than just her arrows, finding the smallest of targets among the multitude of distractions, and Neil feels his skin flush at the memory of the last real conversation he’d had with Kevin. They see each other every day, talk every time they do, but it’s been nothing but surface conversations; he hadn’t apologized and Kevin hadn’t asked him to.

“Yeah.” He reaches around Thea to mess one hand through Kevin’s hair – once upon a time he had been the taller of the two and the action was a common, unconscious thing, but now Kevin shoves him away with fond annoyance and towers over him when they stand. “But it’s still important to them.” If Kevin’s sudden swat to Neil’s hand is any sign, he accepts the comment for the apology it was meant to be.

It’s maybe ten minutes before classes are set to resume when Robin creeps in next to Neil, pressing her body against the length of his back and resting her chin on his shoulder; he can feel the scratch of the embroidery on her shirt through his own, and he reaches back to pat at her hair awkwardly from this angle. “What’s up, baby bird?”

Her voice is a whisper brushed against the back of his neck. “I want to drop out. Get my GED.” It’s nothing Neil hasn’t considered for himself over the years, and all too easy for him to forget that only two weeks before he’d been cajoled into applying for a single college, but his gut instinct is to tell her not to. Neil doesn’t have any younger siblings, but he imagines it’s at least something like this.

“You should finish it out,” he whispers back.

She stiffens behind him and he can feel the way her shoulders raise and lower in a shrug; she tries so hard sometimes, to be like Andrew, but they’re as different as night to day. “I don’t want to be here without you guys.” On most days it never even occurs to Neil that Robin is technically not their peer – she’s so much an equal member of their group, so much a part of his life, that it’s only when reminded that he remembers she’s barely fifteen. “I _can’t_ be here without you guys.”

It suddenly makes much more sense, but Neil is still not her brother – he cannot dispense advise about something like this. He’s not even her, well, _anything_. Maybe her friend. “You should talk to Andrew—”

“I’m talking to _you_.” It’s not the first time one of the others has come to him with a more delicate issue, left him to mediate with Andrew and hopefully soften the blow of his reaction. He’s noticed it more since he got out of the hospital, when coming to him was no longer passable as a mere convenience. More surprising has been noticing the number of times it’s been the reverse, of one of them taking Andrew aside to ask Neil a favor like he’s more inclined to say yes if it’s Andrew doing the asking (Most surprising of all has been realizing that maybe they’re onto something). Neil keeps telling them that he can’t play the middleman between the pack and its alpha, that it can’t be the way things work, but then he keeps doing it anyway. “I’ve been thinking… I can get my GED this year, start classes at the community college with Jean and Erik. I just… I can’t be left behind.”

Robin sounds like she used to, before the bite: breakable. That, more than her actual words, is what has Neil’s last resolve softening. “I’ll talk to Andrew,” he promises without promising which side he’ll be advocating, and he runs a hand through her hair while he comes up with a few more plans to tie up his loose ends.

* * *

Neil is home alone when he gets his acceptance letter to CSU Chico.

Wymack almost cries into the phone when he tells him, and the woman he’d been issuing a speeding ticket to offers her congratulations as well. His second call is to Kevin, because he’s still Neil’s best friend and he’s still basically his brother despite never actually apologizing for the fight they’d had a month before – they just pretend it hadn’t happened. Kevin is proud of him, of course he is, but the pride is tinged with sadness that they’ll be separated after all this time; Kevin had received his acceptance to Davis the week before.

Neil’s third call is to Andrew, who shows up ten minutes later with takeout from Neil’s favorite Mexican restaurant. “Congratulations,” he shoves the bag at Neil as soon as the front door has opened. “Have a burrito.”

 It’s the same order he always gets when he’s happy about something, and he’s not sure when they became the sort of friends who knew the other’s favorite things so well, but he also knows that if Andrew had been the one to call with good news Neil would have been at his apartment with two pints of Phish Food in about the same length of time. They sit on the living room couch together. “I’m leaving Beacon Hills.”

Realistically, college never seemed like the sort of thing that would happen for Neil – when he was younger he thought he would be going to Harvard to study something, he didn’t know what, but only because Allison was going to Harvard. It had taken a good ten years of being confused whether he wanted to _be_ Allison or be _with_ Allison before he gave it up entirely to be her friend, and by then he was too busy almost dying on a regular basis to really dedicate the time to consider something like college. But now it’s here, and he’s going – in August, granted, but it counts.

Andrew bumps their elbows together. The couch is a comfortable four-seater but they’re pressed together at the thighs and shoulders and Neil can’t quite come up with an explanation for why that is – or he can, but it falls entirely under the realm of _things they do not talk about_. It was some point around the start of his junior year when he realized that the safety he felt around Andrew was a different, more dangerous kind than the safety he felt around Kevin. Kevin is his brother in everything but name, in everything but blood, and being around him feels like being _home_ , comfortable and constant. But being around Andrew feels softer, more subtle, like something that curls in his chest when he’s close and tightens when he’s not.

Neil is not, in fact, an idiot. He knows that that means.

He just, like so many other things in his life, does not talk about it.

“I’m going to miss you, Drew,” he whispers, like an idiot – they spend so much time not talking about it and here he goes, _talking about it_.

It doesn’t matter that it’s true.

* * *

It’s hardly the first time he’s shown up unannounced at Allison’s front door and it will hardly be the last; her mother welcomes him in with a silent wave and a bemused expression (the Reynolds’ still aren’t quite sure what to make of Neil. He’s not the sort who would otherwise be friends with their daughter, and he doesn’t act like they’re friends at all – they bicker and they leave or they put on movies and fall asleep in her bed) and gestures to the stairs. Allison didn’t leave her house for two months after Seth left, and finally did only to stay with Neil; three days before school was set to start she came out of his room like nothing had ever been wrong, and things were normal after that.

Neil needs normal right now.

“Allie,” and he doesn’t bother to knock before charging into the bedroom; they’re past that. “I have a problem.”

Allison raises one perfectly manicured eyebrow in the mirror, other hand unwavering with a pair of tweezers. “Neil,” her voice is flat and unaffected, “be more specific. You have _so many_ problems.”

The strangest part of his life now is the part where Allison is one of his closest friends. They’d been in similar circles their entire lives, advanced classes and extracurriculars together, but it took the literal life and death of everything recently to form a bond – Neil thinks there might be some saying about bonds formed in battle or blood, maybe from Shakespeare, but he can’t quite remember; he’s considered a genius at maths and nearly there at languages, but literature has never been something he excelled at, or even enjoyed. Allison would know. “True. _Rude_ , but true.” She apologizes by scooting over on her vanity’s padded bench, making room for him to sit beside her. He doesn’t like the way the lights cast every scar and scratch on his face into exaggerated relief. “I got into Chico.”

“You could have gotten into Yale.” Allison is the only person he knows who can wield a compliment like a weapon: her words are sharp, pointed like blade – whatever you are, you could be more. “But congratulations.”

Neil shrugs off the sentiment like Allison had hers over Harvard. They both know how smart they are, have been competing their entire academic careers over it, and now it’s a non-issue between them. They’re too busy fighting for their lives, side by side, to fight over something as insignificant as which of them does better on pop quizzes. “That’s not the problem.”

Allison raises the other eyebrow, now as perfect as the first, and places the tweezers back into the vanity’s smallest drawer. “You don’t say.”

On the way over he’d worked out a speech in his head – the words catch in his throat before he can even get the first of them out, but he snorts a laugh in response to her. It’s times like these, these private moments where Allison doesn’t pretend, doesn’t hide how intelligent she is or how ruthless she is, where Neil remembers why he thought he was in love with her for years. It somehow makes everything _less_ awkward between them. “So I got into Chico. And it’s only an hour away, and it has the programs I want to study, and—”

“You don’t want to leave Andrew, I get it.” Behind the sharp gaze and the no-nonsense tone, there’s warmth in her features when she gives him her full attention. “Tell me everything, Josten.”

“We’re not dating,” Neil absolutely does not whine. His voice raises in pitch at the end, turned up in a note of confusion and questioning, but he will swear with every breath in his body that he does not _whine_.

And that actually catches Allison by surprise. Her face loses its angles, her eyebrows lose their arch, and her lips gape into a tiny _o_ shape; she looks, for that single moment of stunned silence, entirely average. “Really?” When she turns, straddling the bench, she rests her elbows on his thighs in case he tries to run (he was vaguely considering trying to run). “I would have thought, with all the lingering stares and the casual one-on-one time that—” She blinks, slowly, just once. “ _Really_? Not even a little?”

Neil leans forward and buries his face in the hollow of her collarbone; her skin smells like citrus and sharp florals, and her shirt is soft. “Not even a little.”

“Well sweetie,” and she runs her long nails through the curls on top of his head, “I think _that’s_ your problem.”

* * *

Kevin doesn’t get cut from the team.

Mostly because after he mopes his way through the first two weeks of school and mopes his way into forgetting an English assignment, Neil takes matters into his own hands. It’s a Saturday afternoon and they’re sprawled across Andrew’s living room, and he bears down on them with all the steel he can pull into a five-three frame. “Erik,” and the older man looks up sharply at his name. “Help Kevin with science. Jean, English.” They both do nothing more than nod wordlessly, mostly because it’s so rarely that Neil is like this with them. Andrew only raises an eyebrow.

“I didn’t know you were having trouble with classes,” he doesn’t say it as an accusation, or even a question – he says it as someone who is too used to knowing everything about the people he considers his, and as someone who doesn’t hate surprises so much as enjoy puzzles.

“He’s doing fine with classes,” Neil speaks before Kevin can, but he smiles a little at the interruption rather than get annoyed by it; Kevin might be prone to over-dramatics, especially when lacrosse is tangentially involved, but even at his worst he’s a good student. Just not, in the school’s eyes, good _enough_ – they required grades just higher than his C-average in science and English to allow team members to continue their participation in sports. Even when they’re fighting, or recovering from one, Neil will come to defense on that fact every time. “He’s just in danger of losing his athletics privileges.” Neil’s lips twitch with a smile when Andrew only rolls his eyes around a muttered _oh no, how terrible_ that sounds exactly the opposite. “He just needs some work.”

Kevin clears his throat from his seat directly beside Neil, smiling losing out to the irritation. “I _am_ right here, you know.”

“Then say thank you to Erik and offer to help Jean with his double pick rotations,” Neil snarls in response. Even before Kevin was turned into a werewolf, before a punch to his arm or a smack to his skull were rendered essentially useless, there was never that sort of violence between them. Mostly it was because puberty had left Neil a good eleven inches shorter than Kevin and with the reach to match, but a little bit because they both knew he would still win. Still, he manages to turn the command into a punch of its own, and Kevin meekly obeys. “Fuck, do I have to do _everything_ for you guys?”

Jean grins up at him from where he sits on the floor. “Probably.”

He wants to refuse, on the principle of it, but there’s one more thing he’s already promised to help a pack member deal with – Jean is probably right. “Andrew,” he doesn’t finish the sentence, just heads into the kitchen and knows without looking that Andrew will follow. He tosses Andrew a soda before they start talking, digging in the back of the fridge where he hides Neil’s favorite juices from the others, and takes a seat on the counter next to the sink. “It’s about Robin.”

“What about Robin?” It’s the same as it had been earlier with Kevin, no anger that Neil sometimes knows more about his own people than he does – there’s interest, sure, but mostly just a quiet acceptance. Neil can think of a dozen other times just like this one off the top of his head, and in a moment of cold realization he wonders when he became the pack’s unofficial second.

“She wants to leave.” Andrew reacts much like Neil, and Robin, suspected he would – a flash of red eyes and a furious growl caught in his chest, and where any of the wolves would be cowering before him Neil only latches on to his arm and drags him away from the doorway. The rumbling quiets. Neil doesn’t release his grip, but he turns his hand so that it’s his thumb that rests at the delicate pulse point on the underside of Andrew’s wrist, and he counts the number of beats. When they slow beneath his touch, when Andrew has calmed down, he lightly rubs his thumb in acknowledgement. “She wants to take community college courses with Jean,” and Andrew nods his head like he agrees. That’s when Neil goes in for the kill. “In two years, I want to bring her to Chico with me.”

“No.” His refusal is out before Neil even has a chance to finish his sentence, immediate and instinctual – he gets it. Packs aren’t supposed to split up like this. It puts strain on the pack as a whole, weakens each individual member… and it weakens the alpha. Neil might be leaving, along with Allison and Thea, sure, but they’re not wolves and they’re not quite pack. The rules bend more easily for them. And Kevin might be following Thea, sure, a whole two hours away, but he’s never been one of Andrew’s quite like the others have. Andrew _chose_ Robin. “You want her to be alone? Without a pack?”

“ _Without a pack,_ Andrew, she’ll be living in an apartment with _me_.” Andrew glares at him, mulish, but Neil refuses to avert his stare. He can feel the way Andrew reacts to the challenge in the sudden pounding of the vein against his thumb, but he holds firm. “Tell me it wouldn’t be the same thing.”

Andrew only drops his gaze when he drops his head to Neil’s side, resting his forehead in the hollow between his ribs. “I _can’t_ ,” and he sounds entirely wrung out, tired in a way he never lets them see. Suddenly the air in the kitchen feels heavy, thick with all of the things they have built their relationship on not talking about, and Neil would regret pushing against Andrew’s boundaries like this on any other day except that now Andrew only relaxes against him. For just this once their positions are reversed, and Andrew rests the weight of his body, and his position, against Neil. “Robin would be fine with you. She would probably prefer it.”

Neil hovers, frozen, until Andrew gives permission with a quiet hum and he rubs his fingers against Andrew’s scalp. “You’re not doing this alone, you know.”

Andrew’s responding _yeah, I know_ is a whisper against his ribs.

* * *

Four weeks later Neil wakes up at three in the morning to find Andrew dripping rain and blame and pissy attitude all over his bedroom floor.

“It’s raining.”

Neil snorts on a laugh – Andrew is soaked to the bone, wet blowing in through the open window, and the words can barely be heard over the torrential late-November downpour blowing outside. “I noticed.”

Andrew glares, shaking his head like a dog to send droplets of freezing cold water flinging from his hair and all over the bed, and Neil bites his cheek to keep from shrieking at the sudden _cold_ that hits his skin. Wymack might have finally reached a grudging peace with the local werewolf pack, but there’s only so much to be done if he hears one of the boys screaming in the middle of the night. “You said fire would do it.”

He remembers. The hedgewitch had rolled into town about five days before, up from Los Angeles, and had spent the majority of her time in Beacon Hills drugging men at bars in her peculiar brand of vigilantism. She hadn’t been the sort to merit a violent response, but they had needed to eliminate her garden before anyone else ended up comatose; it had been Neil (and an old Irish text. His Gaelic was better than Kevin’s now) to discover that burning the plants would reverse any spell they had been used to cast. “Fire _would_ do it.”

Andrew growls and grumbles his way out of his wet clothes, leaving puddles across the floor as he peels the soaked fabric off and stuffs it into the hamper, and into a set of Neil’s – the pants are too long and the shirt too narrow, and his hair sticks up in haphazard tufts that make him look the least threatening Neil could imagine him. It doesn’t help the image, the way he drags the pillow out from under Neil’s head and throws it to the foot of the bed before bullying his way onto half the mattress. They lay there, head to foot, while Neil tries to remember if Andrew has ever stayed the night before – the others have, plenty of times, but usually in the living room and never alone. It reminds him too much of that night in the hospital, which until now he had convinced himself was nothing but a morphine dream, only this time there’s no morphine. “When it dries up,” Andrew finally speaks, “ _you_ deal with it.”

Neil responds by digging his socked feet up through the comforter to kick against Andrew’s bicep. “I read books in old languages, I’m not the damn weatherman.” The silence fills with the pitter-patter of rain against the roof, strong and showing no signs of letting up, and Neil rolls onto his side to cushion his head on his arm. “I did my job, the rest is up to you.” He doesn’t offer Andrew any of the blankets, but he faces away from him like he doesn’t worry to have him at his back.

It’s a few more minutes of quiet before Andrew speaks again. “Neil?” His voice sounds soft, half asleep, and there’s a shifting in the mattress as he changes positions – Neil can feel legs press against his back for a second.

“Yeah?”

Legs against his back translates as feet pressed against his hips, and the sharp pain of Andrew kicking him is nothing like the pain of landing face first on the hardwood floor. “Shut the fuck up.”

* * *

The morning of Neil’s eighteenth birthday – and Nathaniel’s nineteenth – celebration dawns to a warm sunrise and a pile of teenaged werewolves crowding the upstairs hallway.

He’s woken by their furtive whispers to keep it down, to _not_ wake him, and he would probably be mad if he didn’t love each and every one of them so much; it doesn’t matter that it’s not his actual birthday – that was back in January, but he hasn’t acknowledged it in years. It was a date he shared with his biological father, born on the same day, and instead he’s celebrated on the day he and his mother finally left ever since. Kevin knows the truth, but has never once spilled the secret – only because this new date cements Kevin as the older of the two by nearly two months rather than younger by nearly a year. “He’s awake, assholes,” Kevin hisses, and that’s all the warning Neil gets before they’re through the door and piling into the bed with him.

“Happy birthday,” Allison greets him, taking in the mess of the room. “You look like crap.” He doesn’t doubt it – Neil had been up for half the night with a history assignment that felt as though it was in another language and the other half with and borrowed text that definitely was. It had been three cups of coffee and the flat remains of a Red Bull he’d found on his desk before he’d passed out at his computer, and another hour before he’d dragged himself to bed. There’s no mirror anywhere near his room but he can imagine the result, the way the purple circles beneath his eyes highlight the welts of scars across his face, all punctuated by flat brown eyes and flat brown hair.

“I think,” and it’s been awhile now, the thought gnawing at the back of his mind, “I’m going to stop dyeing my hair. Or lose the contacts, maybe.” He’d started changing the colors of his appearance when he and his mom fled all those years ago, to look less like the man they left behind in Baltimore and more like the anonymous faces on the train that brought them to California. He doesn’t much like the idea of looking like his father again, but he doesn’t like the idea of looking like his mother either – in the end, she’d left him too. Maybe, just maybe, he was finally ready to look like nobody but himself.

Allison runs coral colored nails thoughtfully through his bedhead tousle of curls. “I say yes. The world needs more of your baby blues.”

He groans, but also smiles at her, and Kevin somehow manages to wiggle his way beneath the blankets without disrupting the eight other people arranged around them; he burrows against Neil’s side until his head rests under his arm. “Abby’s brother is a redhead,” he admits casually, “and my mom had blue eyes.” They are eighteen years old and have been best friends since they were seven, and basically brothers since they were eleven – Neil gets it. Maybe he doesn’t need to look like any family but the one that he’s chosen, the one that chose _him_.

“Happy birthday to me,” Neil grins down at him, like they didn’t have this same conversation back in January.

Kevin grins back and slings an arm across Neil’s hips. “Happy birthday to you.”

They make it downstairs only when the collective grumbling of stomachs becomes too loud to ignore, trickling into the kitchen in ones and twos until they’ve forsaken the upstairs entirely; Wymack leans against a counter with a piece of toast and a cup of coffee and a breakfast buffet set up behind him. “Hey kid,” he greets gruffly, and if he was unaware of the party going on at six in the morning, he doesn’t show it. “Happy birthday.”

Neil allows a hug, one of the few he and Wymack exchange a year. “You made breakfast?”

Wymack snorts. “God no. Abby did most of it, and the rest is from that coffee shop downtown.” There’s a reason Neil and Kevin spent nearly as many nights at Abby’s as they did at Wymack’s when they were younger, and it only partly had to do with the obvious, undefined relationship between the two and everything to do with Wymack’s inability to cook anything palatable. “You and Kevin also have the flu today, so school isn’t expecting you. Don’t get used to it.”

After breakfast, after the pack slowly says their goodbyes to head off to school (or work, in Erik’s case, or generally away, in Andrew’s case), Kevin meets Neil’s eyes over the kitchen table and smirks. “Game on, Josten,” and they’re still in pajamas, barefoot and sloppy like they would when they were younger. “Race you out.” Kevin might have the height advantage but Neil has the speed, and there’s a fairly vicious tussle at the back door before they erupt into the backyard.

Lacrosse can’t be played with only two people. Not really. Instead they play a version of it that mostly entails hurling balls at each other at high velocity and very rarely at one of the netting goals that have been a fixture of the garden for a decade now, and occasionally trying to tackle the other without looking like it’s intentional. It’s an hour or so before they’re both flat in the grass, dirty and panting, and Kevin digs his bare toes into the soil. “You’re the President Buchanan of lacrosse,” he says without even the hint of a smile on his face. “No wonder they cut you from the team.”

Neil grins. “Yeah,” he agrees happily. “And you’re the Ross of the pack. No wonder everyone hates you.”

It’s been a long time since he heard Kevin really laugh – since before the night with Riko, maybe even since before the entire werewolf thing started. Not that Kevin had been any less serious before, but he’d definitely been less scared. Hearing it now is the best basically birthday present he could imagine. “I love you, Neil.” It’s one of the few things Neil knows for sure, despite the fact that they so rarely say it.

“I love you too, Kev.”

“I’d love you both a whole lot more if you didn’t track that dirt into my house,” Wymack calls from the porch, and throws them a pair of towels. Once they’ve put the yard into whatever sense of order they can manage (and scraped the drying dirt from elbows and feet and faces), it’s just about the time they would be starting third period. “You’re not actually sick so we can’t go into town,” he tells them both in that stern way that means he doesn’t mind at all, “so we can either stay in and watch movies, or drive to the city.”

There are plenty of cities within driving distance of Beacon Hills, but only one is _the city_ ; it’s an easy drive but a good two hours one way, and it’s an easy decision to make. “Movies,” Kevin doesn’t let Neil answer, but it’s the answer he would have given.

“And we’re ordering lunch from Los Mariachis.”

It’s taken eighteen years, and eight years, for them to become whatever version of a family they are now; Neil wouldn’t trade it for the world. “Done,” Wymack grins, “and done. Let’s start with _Lethal Weapon_.”

Later, in the evening when Wymack finally rises and heads for the stairs with a brief “sorry, work,” – Neil _gets_ it, he does, and when he’s not completely out of his mind terrified that he won’t come home someday he’s achingly proud of Wymack. He keeps the entire town safe from creatures and criminals alike, and most of the time the people he protects don’t even know what he’s done for them – Kevin nudges Neil with his shoulder. “Good day?”

“Good day,” Neil agrees. They haven’t had many of those lately.

When Wymack returns it’s as the sheriff, beige uniform pressed and ready, and he hovers in the doorway like he’s not sure he should leave. “Got any plans?” It’s been over a month since he went from the legal father of two teens to the legal father of two (young, very young) adults, but this is the first night he’s lingered like maybe they might take advantage of that.

Kevin shrugs. “Heading to Thea’s,” and then, with a start, “not to _stay_.” He was a terrible liar when he was eight and he’s a terrible liar at eighteen, but at least he’s fully aware of it now enough to not bother trying. “I’ll be back before you are,” he tells Wymack, and Neil wants to laugh a little bit – worst kept secret in town.

“See that you are,” Wymack tells him sternly, but very graciously doesn’t say anything else that he’s clearly thinking; it’s a gratitude shared by his son, if the relieved sigh that darts out of Kevin’s mouth is anything to go by. Apparently there’s quite a bit that _they_ are choosing not to talk about, too. He hugs Kevin like he does every night, one arm slung across his shoulders, and Neil again like he’s only allowed on certain days of the year. “And see you tomorrow, Neil. Andrew staying over later?”

The way he says it makes it all one sentence, See-you-tomorrow-Neil-Andrew-staying-over-later, and it’s apparently not even a question because he’s checking the keys in his pockets and grabbing a bottle of water without bothering to hear which it is. It’s a whirlwind of a question that leaves Neil confused, waiting in the entryway long after both Wymack and Kevin have gone. _You staying over?_ he finally texts, and he doesn’t get a response.

(He gets an answer though, later, in the way that Andrew slides through his window and steals his pillow again, squishing it against the footboard before taking up more than a fair half of the bed.)

* * *

“Neil!”

“ _What_?”

“How the fuck do I kill it?”

Andrew is fury and frustration, snarling some mix of the two over the scrabbling of fingernails like rusty kitchen knives that try to find purchase behind the door. Only thirty minutes ago Neil had been dragged from a prom he hadn’t cared about anyway for a creature that they could _definitely_ handle on their own, and now his pants are ripped into three ribbons across his thigh, as well as his thigh beneath, and the heavy sludge of blood dripping to the floor only seems to send the – what had Andrew called it? The empuse – into a further frenzy. It battles the door they’ve taken refuge behind, Andrew looming against Neil half like a shield and half like a threat, and it’s the first moment of the entire day where Neil feels like he’s in his element. “How the fuck should I know?”

Andrew is rarely kind, but he is also rarely explosive – he goes nearly apoplectic then. “You didn’t look it up? _That’s_ _your fucking job_!”

“ _I thought I was bait_!”

Something snaps in Andrew then. He rips the door open, off its hinges even, and grabs the frantic empuse by one arm to haul it forward. Long limbs flail wildly for purchase as it rakes its talons up, around, trying to break his vise-like grip and reach his face. It’s not singing anymore but keening, screeching, high and loud and desperate. It sounds rabid, _starving_ , and it reaches again, gains purchase in the wood of the floor, almost there—

Andrew snaps its neck like a pencil, tossing the twitching corpse behind him carelessly. And Neil—

Neil staggers under the sudden realization that he is so in love with Andrew that it _aches_.

There’s a quiet resonance in the knowledge, a vibrating bow string of obviousness that echoes in _oh_ , _of course_. It slots into place like it’s always belonged there, like he’s always known without knowing, and maybe this is the meaning of all those moments and somethings and not-quite-conversations they’ve been having. It’s the smallest earthquake he’s ever felt, rocked to the core in a ridiculous tie and a ruined suit and with the still-cooling body of a spider-like skin eater only feet from him.

He can feel the way his face goes open and gentle, probably a neon sign for the world to read, even as Andrew continues his irritated fuming. “What the _fuck_ , Neil, you are such a fucking idiot, the only reason we even _keep you around_ is for—”

It’s probably the last of the adrenaline leaving his body, oozing out along with the blood from his leg, that has him acting against his better judgment; instead of sitting down or freaking out or considering calling Betsy, Neil just fists his hands in the fabric of Andrew’s shirt and tugs him across the too-few inches between them. “Yes or no?” he asks, smirking at the single moment of shock that leaves Andrew soft and slow.

He recovers quickly. “ _Yes_ ,” he snarls, and tangles a hand around Neil’s loosened tie to haul their lips together.

It’s just this side of desperate, a first and last kiss all in one, the pleasure of finally getting something you never thought you could actually have and the pain of feeling like, of knowing, that you can’t keep it. Neil hasn’t been kissed like this in his life, hasn’t been kissed much like anything at all, but he thinks it shouldn’t surprise him that Andrew kisses exactly like he does everything else – with the anger born of fear, not fury, and with giving too much of himself and asking nothing to fill the hollow left behind.

Neil releases the white-knuckled grip he has on Andrew’s t-shirt long enough to slide his hands up the broad expanse of his shoulders and, when Andrew hums acquiescence against his lips, up into his hair. There’s nothing but instinct guiding the way he tightens his fingers, pulling Andrew’s head back, and he presses his teeth against the tendon of his neck and _bites_. Andrew moans, low and gutted, and Neil can’t complain about the way his back is slammed heavily into the wall when Andrew chases after, licking his way into his mouth. “Neil.” He says his name in a voice as rough and broken as the remains of the house they’re standing in, and Neil pushes himself into it.

They fall into bed together with the same ease the rest of their lives have fallen in together, and maybe later they will sit down and discuss how that is, how it always comes back to Andrew and Neil like they’re two halves of the same matched set, but right now there are very few words between them. There is movement and friction and then Andrew’s careful _yes or no?_ – _yes Andrew, it’s always gonna be yes_ , he hears himself promise – that he draws against Neil’s skin with his lips and teeth and tongue, and Neil feels like every cell in his skin is electric, a crackling charge reaching out to draw Andrew in, and he does, moves into him softly and then faster, harder—

Neil stops thinking much at all after that, and for the first time in as long as he can remember the nervous buzz of his brain is comfortingly quiet.

* * *

“Hey kid.”

Wymack is sitting on the couch the following morning, television on but he’s reading the paper instead of watching – it’s the sports section, of course, and the highlights of last night’s game in the background. And despite the fact that he knew both Neil and Kevin would be out all night, even though he told them to _have_ _fun_ when they were out all night, Neil has a moment of full-body terror that he’s been caught. The shoes he’s been carrying go flying, clattering to the floor of the entryway where they’ll most like stay – the one that isn’t entirely unwearable is stained with a mixture of empuse fluids and forest mud that doesn’t bear thinking about. “How was the dance?”

Neil grins, or grimaces, or some combination of both. “It was good.” His leg is _throbbing_ in pain by now, sharp ripples that tell him the exact number of stitches hastily butterflied into his skin by an unpracticed hand. He hasn’t eaten enough in the last twenty-four hours to be able to take one of the pain pills they all keep hidden away in kitchens and bathrooms, but there’s only twenty feet between him and the fridge now. “I imagine. I can extrapolate from the thirty or so minutes I was actually there.”

“Of course you didn’t go.” Wymack rolls his eyes. He does not, however, ask about the shoes or the suit (both entirely ruined) or why Neil walks like he’s forgotten how to do so entirely. The quiet acceptance he now has for his sons and their creatures that go bump in the night has grown in leaps and bounds once the long winter nights turned slowly to spring.

“In my defense,” Neil hobble-hops over to show him the long bandage and thread combination that sweeps up his thigh like a cresting wave. “There was a thing.”

“A thing.”

The adrenaline of the fight, of his injury, has never quite left him; he starts in on a full recap of his night _after_ the single dance that Allison had dragged him into with nervous excitement. “Yeah, it was a—” That part of his brain that functions best on too much danger and too little sleep screams at him to stop talking, to not mention that the creature was something that fed on sexual energy. There’s a conversation that he will have with Wymack on some far distant future occasion about what _actually_ happened on the otherwise unenjoyable April night of his senior prom, but it won’t be today and it won’t be like this. “Long story,” he finishes, probably unconvincingly. “The short version is that the thing was not from around here, so I had a few books to go through.”

It’s a curious dance, watching the way Wymack drifts between desperate to ask and trying to appear completely disinterested. “The thing in your books, that the same thing that chewed up your leg?” He asks it like he knows something that Neil doesn’t, and sudden the pain in his leg is nothing compared to the cold grip of fear that takes hold of his spine. Kevin isn’t home yet, but he wasn’t supposed to be – he and Thea went to a party with the rest of the team and told them to not expect him until lunch. The others have checked in with varying frequencies in the group chat he never responds to, but there have been no phone calls to suggest anything happened to any of them.

“Yeah,” he admits quietly. Worriedly. “We got it, though.”

He fixes Neil with a stare that he almost doesn’t recognize anymore – it’s the look he used to give him, the one that very clear states how little he believes what he’s being told – before his attention drifts away from his face to a point somewhere below his chin. “That the same thing that chewed up your neck, too?” He nods his head with a glint of mischief in his eyes, pointing with his chin, and Neil feels his face go warm with a blush but refuses to give him the satisfaction of moving to feel for what he suspects is quite obviously there.

“No, uh, that was— I mean those are— There’s a slight chance that I might be dating Andrew?”

Wymack rolls his eyes and returns to the newspaper. “You don’t say.” He flips a page of the paper with casual, but deliberate, care. “I’ve known that for the last six months.”

His brain has been collecting a litany of excuses and defenses, running so fast that it’s completely blown past the conversation they’re having and is already scrambling for the words needed for a conversation ten minutes from now, until quite suddenly Wymack’s words register a form of meaning. Everything goes still and silent for a second, even his brain – which hasn’t been still or silent in as long as he can remember, and it worries him then, how _quiet_ the world must seem to everyone else – leaving him slack-jawed. “What?”

“Neil.” Sometimes, Wymack says his name in the same tone he uses when he calls Kevin _son_ – it’s an affectionate, oftentimes irritated tone, and whenever Neil hears it he feels inexplicably safe. “I figured out something as ridiculous as _werewolves_ , you really think I didn’t notice something as obvious as you and Andrew?”

The thing is, Neil is far from stupid. He speaks three languages fluently and reads an additional four (most of which are long dead), and he has been in advanced math classes since the fifth grade. His best friend got into Harvard and the only reason he didn’t was from a literal lack of trying, and he’s already been informed that he’s tested out of the first two and a half years of his chosen major at Chico. He’s not stupid. He is, however, completely illiterate to the obvious. “Obvious,” he repeats Wymack’s words, almost like a question. “Right.”

Wymack throws his head back and _laughs_ , the deep belly laugh that Neil hasn’t heard from him in far too long. “You didn’t know until just now, did you.”

He didn’t, but maybe he did. There was nothing to know, maybe still isn’t – he doesn’t know what they are now only that they’re _something_ , and that the only difference between the something of today and the something of yesterday, of last week or last month, is the way that Andrew had reached out, unflinching, to see if Neil was still there when he woke. “Hints were maybe dropped last night, yeah.”

Wymack repeats _hints_ in that same amused tone, the one that’s not quite disbelief but is definitely disbelieving, and Neil clamps down on every telling reflex that might tiptoe a blush across his cheeks at the implication. He thinks he fails. Instead of calling him out on it Wymack only tugs him into an easily escaped one-armed hug. “I don’t need to tell you to be careful, do I?”

Neil still fits neatly beneath Wymack’s arm, the top of his curls just brushing the level of his collarbone; for all that he is nineteen years old and occasionally a badass, he doesn’t hate the way that Wymack feels like some larger-than-life constant in his life. “I know that from a… parental viewpoint,” and he chooses his words careful because it’s still fragile sometimes, the way they talk around exactly what they are to the other. Wymack calls him _son_ when he doesn’t call him _Neil_ , and Neil calls him _Wymack_ when he doesn’t call him _Dave_ (and even then, he calls him _Dave_ because it sounds so much like _Dad_ ). “It might seem that way, especially given the whole,” and he waves his hand around his face, covering the werewolf change as well as the scars he’s earned, “ _everything_. But… I’m good.”

The hand Wymack rubs down his face makes him look tired, and older. “God, I just meant that I hoped school had already given you the safe sex talk. I’m really not prepared for any of this.”

* * *

Some large part of him, the part that knows their lives and knows how dangerous and terrible they truly are, expects everything to go to shit right around then. For once, he’s fine not knowing everything.

Riko doesn’t return the following week, or even the week after. Jean and Kevin take the team all the way to the district championships. Andrew doesn’t disappear. For someone who didn’t expect to live through sophomore year, let alone junior, let alone senior, Neil makes it to graduation (The band gets sick of ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ halfway through the ceremony and switches seamlessly to ‘We Are the Champions,’ much to the anger and chagrin of the teaching staff. Kevin is seated in the row directly ahead of Neil and Allison in the row directly behind, and Neil spends the majority of the evening squished somehow against at least one of them. Abby screams **_that’s my boy!!_** for each of their names, and Wymack wipes a tear away when he thinks none of them are looking.) and starts to think that maybe, just maybe, it’s going to be okay.

And it is, for a few more weeks of parties and vacations. It still is, for the barbeque the town throws for the Fourth of July. And it is again, for another few weeks of lazy days and pickup lacrosse games with Kevin and Wymack. And then it isn’t, because it’s the third Friday in August and Allison flew out on Wednesday, and Kevin and Thea left the weekend before, and Neil is—

Neil is packing the last of his few belongings and leaning against the side of his Jeep and pretending not to notice Andrew, who in turn pretends that he hasn’t been standing at the foot of the driveway for the last fifteen minutes. “It’s only forty miles away,” he finally says aloud. Not to Andrew – he thinks he might be telling himself.

“Forty-two.”

Neil doesn’t turn around, but he smiles. “Answer to everything.” There’s a prickle in the air at the back of his neck that tells him Andrew is most likely standing right behind him now, the respectable foot of space he keeps between himself and the people he trusts (it’s six feet for the people he doesn’t) crackling electric between them. “The point is,” Neil turns to find Andrew’s hand retreating, as though it had been raising to bridge the distance, “that I can come home whenever I want, so saying goodbye—”

Andrew shrugs. “Didn’t come to say goodbye.”

“Asshole.” Both of their lips turn up at the corners when he says it, and Neil wonders again how either of them – how _he_ , really, because somehow Andrew always seemed to have known – had missed this, this _whatever_ between them, because it is painfully obvious. “Saying goodbye would be pointless, anyway, because I’m barely leaving.”

Andrew shrugs again. “Forty-two miles is still leaving.”

Neil groans in frustration, hands coming up and clenching a few times, unsure to touch, before falling back at his sides; Andrew registers the motion by stuffing his own hands into his pockets, and leaning forward to rest his forehead against Neil’s shoulder. “I’m coming back,” Neil promises. He’s already promised Wymack and Abby and Robin, but this one feels different – Andrew has already lost all of the people he’s ever asked to stay. “I can come back next weekend, if I feel like it.”

“Don’t bother,” he says, but the way his hands migrate from his pockets to Neil’s says that he probably doesn’t mean it. “I’m already sick of you.”

Neil huffs out a laugh and leans back against the door of the Jeep, slamming it closed. “I’m coming back,” he repeats. “This—” This is the two-story house on the corner, is the quiet street that borders the woods, is the road leading into the main part of town, is the surrounding hills that block out the sounds from the river and the lights of the fairgrounds – is Andrew. “Is worth coming back to. It’s home.”

“This—” This is the hollow of Neil’s collarbone glistening with the condensation of Andrew’s breath, is the gentle tug at his belt loops urging him closer, is the way Andrew keeps six feet between himself and the people he does not trust and one foot between himself and those he does and no space at all between him and Neil and how that _means something_ – is Neil. “Is nothing.”

Neil grins and offers his hands like a question; he slides them into the softness of Andrew’s hair at the first sign of an answer. “I’m coming back,” he says for the third time, like it didn’t matter the first two; he knows better than anyone the razor’s edge between caring too much and too little.

“Whatever,” Andrew crowds him closer to the side of the car, bullying him backwards by his hips, and turns his face from the crook of Neil’s shoulder to the curve of his jaw, biting his words into the skin to hide the grin he returns. “I don’t care.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this fic was gonna be two chapters, i s2g, but with the long wait i figured i'd drop this as like...... the short interlude chapter to bridge the two main plot arcs
> 
> (also i am impatient and love validation)

The last time Neil shared a bedroom with anyone (in any long term, semi-permanent state, that is. The last time he shared a bedroom with anyone was Andrew, with increasing frequency as the summer wore down, and various members of the pack before that. Allison, when nights were bad for her, or Kevin, when nights were bad for Neil.) was before he came to Beacon Hills. He and his mother crowded close in the dirty, desolate motel rooms on their escape from the East Coast, sleeping back to back on top of musty sheets in narrow beds, hands clenched around the handle of whatever improvised weapon they could carry. They would sleep in fits and starts, bolting awake to the alarm of the others’ breathing, but unable to part even an arm’s length in their unconsciousness out of fear the other would be gone when they woke.

(Not that it mattered. The day eventually came when Neil woke to his alarm and his mother’s absence, and fell asleep later that night in the sheriff’s spare room after being told she was gone.)

His dorm room at Chico is just as small as the rooms he and his mother haunted on their desperate journey across the states, but holds two beds instead of one – instead of feeling cramped it feels impossibly cozy, like a shared secret, and warm despite the painted cement blocks of the walls. Despite the unfamiliarity of the space, it also feels safe; it’s on the third floor, which is also the top floor, and in the farthest back corner from the building’s only entrance, and although there’s no sign yet of his supposed roommate there’s a few bags of things on the bed against the wall they share with their neighbor. It leaves him on the outside wall, which he would prefer.

The dorm hall is quiet – of the people who have already moved in, none seem to be in their rooms. He’s got a handful of papers spread out across his desk of various freshman events to get them settled in, none of which he plans on going to, that seem as good an explanation as any. Instead he takes ten minutes to put away the two duffels and single box of things he’s brought with him. It’s mostly clothes and towels and sheets, things practical and impersonal, and his laptop and a few books he couldn’t imagine going without; he hadn’t packed more than the barest of essentials, reminding Kevin and Wymack and anyone who would listen that he was only forty – _forty-two_ – miles from returning whenever he liked. Most of his belongings are still at home, and the single box contains as much of home as he could fit.

The smallest picture is one of the few he has of his mom, a snapshot of the two of them from their first summer in Beacon Hills, back when he thought they might finally find their happiness. He may have Nathan’s hair and Nathan’s eyes but he’s always had his mother’s smile, and a little bit her nose – he looks at the picture that he sees every day, held in a place of honor beside his bed, and realizes for the first time just how much he looks like she did. Same angles and lines, same long legs he never quite knows what to do with. She’s been gone for eight years now, but he’s got a mirror and a lifetime of memories to keep him from every truly forgetting.

The next picture is larger, and newer, and he lingers over it for at least three minutes longer than he had the one of his mother – it’s from the summer only just ended, the town barbecue on the Fourth of July, and he doesn’t remember the moment it was taken but he knows Abby is behind the camera from the way both Kevin and Wymack are smiling. Neil is smiling too, but at them, and leaning against the table on his elbows; his hair is red and his eyes are blue and his smile is sharp, but every inch of him is his father’s son. Maybe it’s the forty-two miles or the two years of lies and truths between them now, but he can finally admit that.

“Is this your girlfriend?”

He spins, fists raised. The girl that’s managed to sneak up on him (without much sneaking involved, if the large backpack and pile of textbooks on the second bed is any sign of her entrance) replaces the single photo of him and Allison from prom into the box with a guilty expression, and takes a casually considerate three steps backwards. She looks too young for college – baby-faced, with big brown eyes and big brown hair and a soft smile that doesn’t waver, even at the obvious moment of panic. “Sorry! I totally didn’t mean to sneak up on you like that, I’m just excited to meet you.”

Somehow, in the back of his mind, Neil registers that this girl must be his roommate. “You’re—”

“Katelyn,” she cuts him off, smile falling and gaze shuttering and a fight in every inch of her body. “I’m trans,” she tells him, two words that she’s clearly practiced throwing like a punch. “Sorry if that makes it awkward, or whatever.”

“Umm,” and his brain has just enough time to pause and restart, rewriting the previous perceptions he’d formed, before he realizes that his silence probably passes for something far from that. “Sorry for possibly accidentally misgendering you in my head?”

The smile returns like a reward, offered happily. “I haven’t been able to get my birth certificate amended yet so the school said it wouldn’t be _appropriate_ for me to room with a girl.” She shrugs, small and soft, but doesn’t close up the way she had before; maybe the school, and maybe the world, haven’t accepted her yet, but she’s accepted herself and their derision tenfold. “I’ve been really scared what might happen when I got here. Like, pretty sure I drove myself crazy all summer imagining you were going to be some transphobic douchebag. Glad I’m wrong. It’s very nice to meet you, Nathaniel.”

The name is a full body flinch, more than when she’d surprised him, and he doesn’t react the way he used to to hear it, not after all these years, but it’s still too much. Other than his college application, he thinks it might be the first time he’s considered his birth name since he left Maryland – it doesn’t even feel like his anymore. “Neil,” he corrects much in the way she had, maybe harsher than he’d meant it to be but he _can’t_ hear that name, not anymore, not with everything Nathaniel had to be. “It’s Neil.”

“Neil,” she repeats, smile on her lips, and offers her hand. “I think we’re gonna be friends.”

Katelyn smiles like Kevin and carries herself like Robin and seems like she can take on the world like Allison; she reminds Neil of bits and pieces of his best friends, patched together like a quilt. He takes it. “Yeah,” and he smiles at the way she squeezes his fingers like a challenge, like maybe she’s also the sort to throw herself headlong into every fight like the only options she knows are victory or death, “I think we are.”

She doesn’t comment on the scars that cross his face or arms like the road map of a rough life, doesn’t even linger her gaze on them any longer than she would have to to make normal eye contact. She doesn’t ask about the few leather-bound books that are very clearly in Latin, or Gaelic, with fading gold lettering along the spines that read like a bad movie. Instead, after she looks him up and down once more and finds him apparently suiting whatever standards she’s holding to, she hands him the picture she’d originally been glancing at. “So. Your blonde Amazon girlfriend. Gotta say, I’m surprised. Impressed, but surprised.”

In the five-inch heels she’d worn that night, Allison stands just about as tall as Katelyn is in her mismatched socks now – both of those heights are a head or more above Neil’s five-foot-three, and he’s never minded being as short as he is because it makes it so easy for others to underestimate him. He doesn’t have teeth or claws, but he has speed and surprise; it keeps him alive. “Allison’s just a friend.” He doesn’t correct the other description. Allison is _totally_ a warrior princess.

Katelyn tilts the picture for another look, smiling like she thinks he’s lying. Or maybe, if he’s telling the truth, like he wishes it wasn’t. “A _friend_ who is a cute girl you took to prom.”

He’s only met Katelyn a few minutes before and she’s already violated his privacy twice, but she’s also respected the boundaries that matter, his space and his name and his scars, and even though she digs her words in like fingernails into his arm there’s a glint in her eye that says this is just part and parcel of her friendship. It’s not the worst baggage he’s helped carry. “She’s not cute, she’s an eleven.” _I don’t know what that means_ he’d said the first time she’d described herself that way, and she had thrown back her head and laughed with the whole long line of her throat. _It means you’re the only man I’ll ever trust_ she responded, and she made him braid her hair. “Also, pretty sure she took me.”

The picture gets set beside the one of Kevin and Wymack, and in front of the one of Mary; Neil is just sentimental enough to admit that he knows who truly matters in his life. Katelyn takes in the woman who looks just like him and the men who look nothing like him at all, but she doesn’t ask. “Actually just a friend, got it.”

It’s Neil’s turn to grin like he knows that’s not at all what she wants to say; Allison might be nothing more than a friend but even he will admit that she’s a bombshell ball of blonde hair and sly smiles and sharp wit that most people, Katelyn included, seem to be into. “She’s single. I can put in a good word for you, if you’re into that.”

Katelyn’s dark skin turns the color of plums when she blushes.

He doesn’t mean to – he _laughs_. He feels the way it slithers up like a snake, cracking free of the place in his ribs he usually protects (the place where he keeps his heart, and his pack), and suddenly the forty-two miles feels shorter than ever. Or maybe it’s just that the idea of home doesn’t feel nearly as far away anymore. “Yeah,” he agrees, grinning her skin a few shades darker. “We’re gonna be friends.”

There are three fluffy pillows in a careful mountain at the head of Katelyn’s bed; every single one of them is the same shade of soft sky blue that paints her nails, and the case of the laptop that sits on the corner of her desk. He hadn’t taken any notice of them before she hurled one at him with a frown on her face and a glint in her eye and a laughing “I changed my mind, I don’t _want_ to be friends.”

* * *

Their first night in their new room, they watch the first three _Harry Potter_ movies. Katelyn says every line along with the actors. Neil doesn’t say how inaccurate any of the magic is.

(He thinks that maybe, just maybe, he should believe just a little bit more in magic than he does. He’s seen his brother’s body break and melt and rebuild itself into a midnight black wolf twice his own size, seen poison burned from a body with nothing but ash and herbs, seen sparks and shields and more brought into being with nothing but a word. He has lived and breathed and bled magic since he was sixteen years old. It’s just that calling it magic makes it all seem so impossible, so make believe, so much like a movie or a childhood story. Something with heroes and happy endings. Something unreal. Magic is a fiction.)

After the credits roll, Katelyn rolls her eyes up to the impossible heights of her lofted bed and burrows deeper into the nest of blankets and pillows she’s made on the floor. “Too lazy to move,” she informs him, and waves imperiously at her laptop. Eventually he gets that he’s meant to shut it down, and he flicks the lights off before returning to his own bundle of comforters. “I’m sleeping here.”

She’s propped in the corner made where his bed meets the wall, the top of her curls just visible over the rise of his mattress, and he reaches out unthinkingly to pat them. “I can’t wait to trip over you in the middle of the night,” he says, mostly into his pillow; it’s coming up on one in the morning now, not the latest he’s stayed up by far, but the morning had been moving out and moving back in and saying goodbye and he’s _tired_. She snorts a laugh from the floor. “No, seriously. I hope it kills me.”

Her voice is the warm syrup of the nearly asleep. “Can’t die yet,” she tells him, a smile evident in the lightness of her words. “You gotta hook me up with that hot friend of yours first.”

The more he thinks about it, the more he thinks about actually doing it; Allison has not dated since Seth left, though she has spent a few anonymous evenings with some of the various persons drawn to her like moths to a flame. Usually she comes to Neil’s afterwards, curling across the sheets like an over-sized cat until Andrew’s disgust leads one or two or even all three of them out to the roof to watch the stars. “You can’t kill me,” he says instead, mostly joking. “I fight dirty.”

There’s a giggle that turns quickly to a snort that turns quickly into a stifled noise of denial. “I have three older brothers.” Soft noises and rustled movements translates to Katelyn throwing her phone up to the bed, nearly catching Neil in the face; her lock screen is a picture of herself surrounded by three very related looking faces, all smiling brilliant white smiles. “I was raised by wolves.”

All of their eyes are the same shade of big and brown. She wasn’t. “Kevin is like… Thirty-seven days older than I am, and he’s annoying as fuck about it.” The curls bounce at the edge of his mattress and the rustling increases, but before she can move too much – he’d seen a similar exhaustion in her own expression as the movies wore on, and in her voice when she talks about her brothers. Neil doesn’t yet know where Katelyn came here from, but he knows it’s a hell of a lot farther away than forty-two miles – he pats at them again. “Adopted,” he explains, but doesn’t say which of them. It doesn’t matter, not really. It’s both and it’s neither, and they’re family all the same.

Katelyn settles into something so entirely still he knows that she’s not asleep. It’s a pattern of waiting he’s used to – usually it’s Neil who goes silent when he’s got too much to say, but it’s something he’s started seeing in the rest of them as well. “My parents kicked me out,” she finally says, the same ferocious reluctance that she’d had when she stopped him from using the name the school provided for her. Like she’s practiced the words so many times that she can use them as a weapon. “Kenny, he’s the oldest. He and his wife let me come live with them when I was fourteen.”

“Real family loves you unconditionally,” he offers, knowing it will sound like empty platitudes; she doesn’t know that he’s built his from the ground up. _My mother abandoned me in the middle of the night_ , he could say, could tell her that he understands. _Her husband is in prison because he killed twenty-eight people before my fifth birthday._ Instead, he presses his chin into the nest of her curls, where anything will be able to smell him on her tomorrow. “I think my dad loves me unconditionally, too,” he whispers, and wonders what it means that he can only admit the words to a stranger.

* * *

Katelyn is from Chicago, he learns, and she wants to be a surgeon. She was a cheerleader in high school. She’s obsessed with a show called _Gilmore Girls_ and she watches old episodes on repeat while she studies. Her favorite color is robin’s egg blue, and she’s allergic to dairy. He comes to learn all of these things, these mindless, meaningless facts, over the first few weeks that he lives with her, and he doesn’t stop being astounded by the sheer normalcy of it all.

Neil, he realizes in a quiet moment of self-reflection somewhere between stuffing the four thousand calories he’s neglected over the last few days into his mouth at one time while simultaneously coaching Jean through his pronunciation of Old Low Germanic over the phone, has entirely forgotten what normal actually is.

In another moment of self-reflection, this one over a theme song that he hears in his sleep, he realizes that he doesn’t much care for it.

“Is anyone dying back home?” he asks Andrew instead of saying hello. There’s no regularity to their conversations, not like with the others – Neil calls Kevin every other day, and Allison on the days he doesn’t call Kevin. He calls Robin on Tuesdays because he has no classes during the hour she would be in study hall, and Erik on Thursdays because those are Erik’s slowest days at the office. Wednesdays are Jean’s day, but only every other Wednesday because Jean has never had enough to say aloud to fill a more frequent schedule. Wymack calls him every Sunday, in the evening, right after he calls Kevin and right before he has dinner. He calls Andrew once in a three-week span and can’t think of a single thing to say that he hasn’t already sent through a text, and a few things to say that he doesn’t.

(Andrew never calls Neil, but he texts in the mornings.)

If Andrew is surprised to hear from him now, he hides it well; whatever worry might have been in his greeting, if Neil had allowed one, is buried all too easily beneath the aggravated bemusement that often passes as fondness between them. “What the fuck, Neil.”

“Is there any impending death?” he asks again, jittery with nerves like electricity beneath his skin – it’s so _normal_ here, calm in a way that has the buzzing of his brain drilling like a jackhammer into his skull. He can’t concentrate in the quiet. “If I leave now, I can probably get in before the show starts.”

The silence over the line calms him in a way that the relative quiet of the campus library never does; for those few moments, the lapping waves of panic born from inactivity recede. “You goddamn adrenaline junkie,” Andrew finally growls, disgust in every syllable. The derision feels like home. “You’re so fucking damaged.”

He laughs. “Everything here is so _normal_ ,” he says – he might not be able to explain to any of the others why this bothers him so much, the fact that his sleep is uninterrupted here or that his windows are unwarded or that a classmate came up behind him in the quad and his first reaction was not panic or fear but simply _acknowledgement_ , but he knows Andrew will understand him. Andrew has never known normal either. “I’ve spent every night of the past month with my roommate and I don’t even know her blood type yet.”

“You’re right,” Andrew doesn’t bother trying to sound like he’s humoring Neil anymore, voice flat and sarcastic in the way he rarely lets the others see. “That’s super weird.”

The library is quiet and bright, sunlight streaming through the floor-to-ceiling windows at his back. Before he’d called Andrew he’d had both of his headphones in and the volume of the music he’d been listening to set at a moderate level. He’d taken his shoes off to curl into the just-too-firm stuffed chair he’d found, and slung his backpack across the back. Between one moment and the next he’d realized that he would never see or hear an attack coming, and that if he somehow did he wouldn’t be able to run, and also that he wasn’t even the slightest bit worried about that. It was like ice down his spine, the way only a few short weeks removed from Beacon Hills, from _werewolves_ , made him dangerously lazy.

(Made him _human_.)

“How did you do it?” he mumbles the words into the phone, knowing it won’t matter – Andrew will still hear them. Andrew will still hear them, but Neil won’t have to, and it’s always been the thing he hates most about his life: the vulnerability he can never truly be rid of.

He knows the silence is not Andrew thinking of his answer, but more deciding how much of it to give; Andrew might be the number one person is his life that he goes to whenever he has something to say, and Neil might be the _only_ person in Andrew’s, but despite the multitude of things in their conversations that they Do Not Talk About Talking About, they never talk about the fire. “I didn’t live with a roommate,” he says finally. Flatly. “I lived with Aaron.” Sometimes, Neil thinks that the fact that he knows the name of Andrew’s twin, let alone hears it spoken aloud, is a measure of trust too great to quantify. “Also, I was on a very high dosage of lithium.”

Over the nights they’ve spent together in their cozily cramped dorm room, in the same conversations where he’d learned all the normal details of Katelyn’s life, she had asked him again if he had a girlfriend. _Or a boyfriend_ , she had hastily added, sheepishly, and Neil didn’t answer because he didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know how to explain to someone outside of their world how he doesn’t have a boyfriend, but he does have someone who he can trust his vulnerabilities to, reveal the weak parts in his armor, and be offered theirs in return. Someone who makes the buzzing in his brain go quiet and the buzzing in his skin come alive, a feeling that he guesses must be love only for its otherwise unfamiliarity. _I don’t **not** have a boyfriend_, he’d told her with a sort of bafflement that he hoped sounded just enough like insecurity to ignore, and asked her to restart the episode on her computer.

“How do you do it now?”

Andrew grunts the sound that usually accompanies the glare or the shove that tells Neil when he’s being an idiot. “You’re forty-two miles from home and living with one of the _very_ few people on this planet who tolerate your existence,” he reminds sternly. Almost sincerely. “You get the fuck over yourself.”

The silence of the library feels like the starless skies of the full moons back home – infinite and understanding. It’s their own definition of normal. “So,” he says finally, cracking lips dried from the end of summer on a smile, “nothing fun is happening this weekend? I shouldn’t come home?”

There’s a matching smile in the tone of Andrew’s voice, turned warm like the September sun. “Don’t let me stop you,” he says like a caress. Like the feeling of his feet pressed against Neil’s ribs in bed, or his forehead pressed to the spot between his shoulder blades where he used to carry the weight of the world. “It’s not like I care.”

* * *

Katelyn laughs for seven minutes when Neil comes back on Sunday night, and pats the spot on her bed beside her when he only raises a shoulder and an eyebrow quizzically. “Oh Neil,” she laughs again when he sits, suspiciously, nearly an arm’s distance from her. It’s the most physical distance they’ve kept since their first night, when they found a bond in being completely alone and ferociously protective of a family back home. “You _definitely_ had a good weekend.”

His face goes warm and tight in an unfamiliar way, like a sunburn almost, and he ducks his head against her shoulder to mutter against the softness of her shirt. “Went home,” he tells her, a smile on his face even with the heat of his skin, “saw everybody.” He shucks free of his sweatshirt to a half-forgotten rustling in the pouch pocket; the bag is compressed, but not crushed. It opens invitingly when he holds it out for her inspection. “Abby made us cookies.”

She pets his hair like Allison used to. Like Abby does. The cookies are no longer warm but they are still soft, buttery like the curtains in Abby’s kitchen in the always open window that faces their house. Katelyn chews thoughtfully. “So Abby is your… whatever.”

He nods. “She’s our neighbor, and also sort of Kevin’s mom.”

The cookie is ignored for a momentary stare, and a leading, “and Kevin is your brother” like it means something he doesn’t understand yet. He might not always understand the obvious, too caught in the trees to see the forest, but he understands exactly what she’s hinting toward. Abby is not his stepmother because their family’s permanence was never on paper; she is not his mother because she loves him. The cookie disappears in Katelyn’s fondly frustrated huff. “And then Allison is your best friend and my future wife.”

He pulls away from her only far enough to grab a cookie of his own, and to gesture at her laptop slyly. “Don’t think I didn’t see you stealth friend her on Facebook, by the way.”

“Mmm, wasn’t a stealth move.” Katelyn smiles with her whole body, stretching her spine and her lips and arching her shoulders and her eyebrows, unashamed. If Neil had ever thought that Allison was the most likely person he knew to uproot the entire world on her on whims, it was only because he hadn’t yet met Katelyn. They haven’t met, not yet – he knows it’s a matter of _yet_ in the same way that he knows that Katelyn is _his_ now, knows it because it just feels _right_ – but he knows they’ve been talking. He’s terrified. “But who else. Tell me about home, Josten.”

Home is a small town surrounded by trees, is a two-story house with dark wood floors. Is an apartment downtown with white walls and nothing on them, and the memory of a house in the forest. It is a corner dorm room where they pretend no one else exists, and it is a handful of people that he hoards in his heart like precious jewels. “Robin,” he finally whispers against her collarbone, “she’s almost sixteen and as soon as we move off-campus we get to keep her.”

Katelyn laughs, delighted. “I love your life. You talk about people and I never know if they’re friends, or relatives, or a cat? Is Robin a cat?”

Sort of the opposite. “Robin is not a cat.” He thinks, in another life, she might have found more things in common with cats than wolves. When they were much younger, when Robin was just a small face with blonde curls that followed them around, there had been something endearingly kittenish about her. “Right now she lives in an apartment with Jean – he’s French, or he used to be. He just started at the JC. – and Erik, who is basically everyone’s uncle or big brother or whatever.”

He doesn’t talk about Andrew. It’s only been two hours since they said a not-quite-goodbye, but there’s a hollow in his chest that’s been threatening to pull him under ever since. Sometimes he feels like this whatever he has with Andrew is a chasm, vast and dark and dangerous, that tumbles large pieces from his heart as it widens; sometimes he feels like he wants to find out where they go, where that dangerous fall leads. Other times, he feels so breathless that he thinks he might die.

Instead, they eat the rest of Abby’s cookies while they watch the latest summer blockbuster to hit Netflix, and he tries to tell her without words that she’s a little bit of home now too.

* * *

The feeling under his ribs doesn’t go away as the days turn to weeks go by.

He doesn’t sleep, and he does a half-assed job in class, and he calls Andrew every single day without ever once saying why – it’s all the years he stayed alive because he trusted nothing except the feeling in his gut that having him holding his breath as he dials the numbers, and releasing it only when the line connects. The buzzing beneath his skin and in his brain is discordant now, warring frequencies with the other, and it leaves him wary and worn. He feels, very strongly, like something terrible is about to happen.

And so, of course, it does.

* * *

The first person to die is a junior named Alex – he’s the T.A. for the American History course that Neil has been required to take for his general education requirements, and passing mostly thanks to Kevin. Neil last sees him that Friday afternoon when he hands back the class’s papers on the 17th century, Neil’s on the Salem Witch Trials with the _100_ mark circled in red three times, and waves goodbye on his way out the door. They don’t usually speak, just like Neil does not usually excel in the course, so the change to both comes with Alex’s detached offer he _have a good weekend_.

They find his body in the earliest hours of Monday morning, strung up in the gardens behind Trinity Hall – every bone in his lower extremities has been shattered, and he’s been completely eviscerated. Police find no trace of his missing organs. Instead, in the gaping cavity that once housed lungs and a heart and other signs of human life, they find the mutilated carcass of a small red fox.

It’s _him_.

He’s back.

* * *

The day they discover Alex’s corpse, Neil doesn’t leave his dorm room from the time the news breaks. He skips all of his classes, locks his door, and sits on his bed with his back to the corner and his cell phone clutched in hand all the way through to the evening. Katelyn gets home around eight. “Neil!” she startles to see him – Neil is not usually in their room right now, and he’s never this silent when he is. “Did you hear about what happened?”

It pulls a harsh, hysterical laugh from him. “Yeah. Yeah, I heard.” He’d heard and he’d seen, of course he’d had to see for himself, there was so much to sensationalize that it could have all been rumor – but it wasn’t. “Listen, Kate… I need you to do something for me.”

“Okay.” Katelyn’s voice is softer now, that low voice she uses when they talk about her brothers or Neil’s somewhat parents, like she understands immediately how serious things are about to turn. Neil _hates_ it, the way she understands. How close they’ve become. How he’s made Katelyn a target by not hating her, by not making her hate _him_. “Whatever you need, Neil.”

He makes her repeat the phone number until she has it memorized, over and over again, breaks it down into pairs that she chants back at him in the dimly lit quiet of their dorm room: 92. 52. 76. 57. 99. Makes her dial it until the pattern is second nature, until she can do it without even needing to glance at her phone. Makes her remind him of the number forwards and backwards again when she’s blindfolded and spun in circles, when she’s doing jumping jacks, when she’s winded and distracted and has no idea what’s going on. When she’ll need it most. Later, when he’s satisfied, he gestures to the phone in her hand. “If anything happens around you, or if anyone comes up to you, and you feel weird about it… _anything_ sets off that feeling in your gut, you text that number, or you call it in an emergency. Got it?”

She nods slowly, looking suitably scared, and examines the number she’s entered repeatedly onto her screen. “925… that’s Beacon Hills, isn’t it?”

Somehow, with everything they’ve talked about, he doesn’t think his adopted hometown has ever come up between them; not beyond _small town, middle of nowhere_ , at any rate. It’s not that he’s ashamed of it – yeah, Beacon Hills is a far cry from Baltimore, but he hasn’t minded being a small-town kid. And yeah, it frequently makes its appearances on the local news stations for the periodic spikes in violent crimes. And yeah, most people from Northern California hear the name and immediately want to know if anyone he knows has ever been murdered. But he’s not ashamed. – its more that he doesn’t want that reputation following him any more than it has to. “You’ve heard of it, then.”

Katelyn pats the mattress next to her to invite him to sit, and leans her head against his shoulder; it feels just enough like pack that Neil lets out a shaky breath, and remembers how to take in a new one. “From the news,” she admits. “Just enough to know a little bit about what you mean by _anything_.”

* * *

Word must reach home as well, because Andrew arrives in Chico that night.

Neil can only assume he comes in through the window, though the room is closed and locked tight by the time either of them notice his presence. It’s Katelyn who wakes up first, breath hitching on a gasp and her entire body flinches between Neil and the wall of their room; she’d finally fallen asleep in his bed, curled around his legs like a cat. In the second of time it takes her to fully accept a third presence in their room, her phone is out and she’s already dialed, and Neil stumbles into consciousness over her ragged whisper. “I don’t want to die.”

When Andrew’s phone lights up with the incoming call, he throws it with devastating accuracy at Neil’s chest. “Stop telling people that I’m going to murder them.”

Neil saves Katelyn’s contact information as ‘Chico 9-1-1’ and tosses the phone back in the direction it came from, grinning unapologetically. “Fuck you, that was  _one time_.” It doesn’t matter that he can’t see for shit in the dark of the room because he knows Andrew well enough to picture his exact expression, the one that tells the world that he thinks Neil is an idiot and that he cannot believe he willingly spends time with him. “Okay, four times. Katelyn, meet Andrew – he’s not a serial killer.”

Katelyn unwraps herself from the comforter just enough to wave, and to curl herself closer to Neil to whisper against his ear. “Your secret boyfriend is  _totally_ a serial killer. Mad respect, Josten.”

“Not my boyfriend,” Neil whispers back, but winks in the way of Andrew’s scowl. Andrew is not his boyfriend in the way that Kevin is not his brother – as in he’s technically not, but he totally is.

Andrew doesn’t smile, but the furrows above his eyes loosen when he catches Neil’s and the rigid pole of his spine curves gently, released from whatever weight. “I’d rather be a serial killer,” he snarls, an empty threat, and he tugs the small lamp over the edge of the desk for their benefit as he crouches on the floor by Neil’s side. In the dim lighting, shadowed from below, his hair and eyes look more golden than ever. Time slows in the seconds he examines Neil’s face, lingering on the fading freckles and the silvery scars, apparently finding what he was looking for (or, maybe, not finding it.)

“Hey,” Neil’s voice goes soft without his willing it to, curling up like the same lazy smile that he can’t keep off his face at the proximity; it’s been a few weeks since they’ve seen each other in person, and even though there’s a murder in his backyard and a murderer out for his blood, it’s like there’s a compass in every cell of his body and Andrew is their magnetic north.

Andrew frowns, and smiles, and frowns again. “Hi. You have both of your eyeballs,” he comments, rough gravel of his voice drawn across the smooth softness of _caring_.

“Should I not?”

Shuffling at his side is Katelyn moving closer, crawling like a slug along his side; she’d moved as far as she could without falling to the floor as soon as Andrew approached, and he knows her well enough by now to know it’s not from fear. She’s always been good about giving him space. “Well,” Andrew gives in to whatever urge he feels and leans his head forward, burying his face in the hollow of Neil’s neck, “considering we found one just about your shade on Wymack’s doorstep an hour ago, you can see how I might have wondered.”

Neil isn’t sure if he’s Andrew’s anchor, or if Andrew is his. All he knows is that just as he’d adjusted to take the weight of Andrew sinking against him, Andrew braces to keep his from flying off the bed in sudden panic.

“Sit the fuck down, Josten,” Andrew growls, but moves his hands in soft, soothing motions down the quaking of Neil’s thighs; there isn’t a promise made between them yet that’s been broken, and the first was to keep Neil alive. When his heart has remembered to beat again and his lungs remember to breathe in the gasp that punched out of him, Andrew’s hands retreat to their usual, comfortable ten inches of space. “David is fine.”

It _hurts_ , the way he knows that Wymack didn’t have any such assurances.

There’s a quiet squeak of the mattress, and then Katelyn is pressing his phone back into the palm of his hand. “Call him,” she whispers, and recoils when Andrew turns his angry, molten embers glare in her direction; there’s nothing of the wolf in the whiskey-sour color of his eyes, but the man has always been the more dangerous. Katelyn retreats like it’s a threat. She might never know the trust she’s been given, with Andrew leaving her at his back.

The phone connects on the second ring and Neil can feel the relief burning like bile in his throat. Wymack sounds decades older, ground down in these few weeks from granite to sand – he also sounds alive, which is the only thing that matters. “Dave,” Neil tries, staggering over the second syllable. It sounds like another word entirely, a title rather than a name, but it’s something they both politely ignore on the best of days between them, and accept without saying on the worst. “Dave, I’m—” Andrew squeezes his leg once, twice. “Are you—”

“Neil,” Wymack gains back some of his lost years at the sound of Neil’s voice, “it’s fine. We’re fine.”

Somewhere out there is an eye missing its body, and a body missing its heart, and a monster responsible for all of this and more; somewhere out there is Wymack, a father without a son for the hour and change it took to the phone to ring. “There was an eye on your porch,” Neil feels the need to point out, because he’s got a very loose definition of _fine_ as it stands, but even that’s not it.

Wymack snorts a huff of air that isn’t a laugh, but might be a smile. “Wasn’t your eye.”

“Wasn’t Alex’s either.” He hadn’t gotten the closest look at the body, not with the police trying to shoo them as far away as they could, but he hadn’t needed to see the face to know. Alex’s eyes were brown, or hazel maybe, he’d never really noticed and couldn’t quite recall, but they hadn’t been blue.

Neil strongly suspects, as Andrew turns to stone beside him, hard-eyed and heavy, that word did _not_ reach home.

“The TA for my history class was found murdered this morning,” he tells both Andrew and Wymack, and maybe a little bit Katelyn too. She’d heard what happened of course, everyone had by now, but there was a difference between hearing and _knowing_. “And an eviscerated fox was found in his chest cavity.”

Explanations haven’t come yet, but they’ll have to soon. Andrew’s eyes turn from gold to crimson to some terrifying combination of the two, like liquid magma, and the hands he fists into the blankets on either side of Neil’s legs shred the fabric beneath black claws that sprout from the ends. Katelyn goes still and silent, even her breath skipping from fear, as Neil wrestles the phone onto his desk with a sharp “We’ll call you back” before he snags either side of Andrew’s face in his hands.

The gaze locks on his, and does not waver; there’s no comfort in it, only a challenge. Neil is not a wolf, nor is he afraid – he does not submit. “When the fuck,” Andrew’s voice is deeper than usual, wrenched from his chest, and there’s an echo of a snarl chasing the tail end of his words. “Were you going to mention this?”

“When I came home tomorrow,” he says calmly. His palms are cupped around a jaw that quivers from the effort to not shift, his legs on either side of a cornered predator, and he is not afraid. There’s a slow blink in the way Andrew’s spine loosens and his shoulders drop, and he responds by twisting his chest and his neck and his wrist just that much closer; a truce, rather than a stalemate. “When it hit the news, and when everyone starts talking about being afraid. But I figure it looks really fucking suspicious if I disappear as soon as there’s a murder on campus.”

He doesn’t need to say that he already suspects Riko has some way of pinning this on him, if it comes to that. They both already know. “You should have called me,” Andrew snarls. The sharpness of his voice is at odds with the softness of his body, curling in on itself – or rather, curling in on Neil. They are opposite parentheses, safety held like a secret in the mere inches of space between them.

It’s only his skin, vibrating itself like a scream, that keeps him from closing the last of the distance between them. Being alive feels like ice in his veins, hot and cold all at once, and he doesn’t think he can stand to be touched but he reaches out for Andrew all the same; he hides his smile in the hollow of Andrew’s throat, right above the pounding artery, and his lips turn higher when the tempo increases alarmingly before slowing entirely. “And have you come up here, ready for war,” he can’t tell if it’s an argument or an agreement. “Like you are now?”

Andrew’s response is a snort of disdain, is a curl of his lip like contempt. “Come home with me,” he growls, wielding his emotions like a threat; it’s their way of things, the conversations that are half argument and half agreement and entirely, accidentally, tender.

“I will.” An agreement, and then an argument. “Tomorrow.” When Andrew moves to pull away – not his hands from their grip in Neil’s shirt, but his eyes from their position of not attempting to challenge. Neil is a human; he has no such reservations. “Go home,” he orders, and locks his gaze on Andrew’s. Two blue eyes, like a reminder. “It’s not safe to leave them alone right now. I’ll email my professors, make it look less like I’m, you know, _fleeing the scene_.” It would hardly be the first time, which says more about his life than he cares to consider.

He does, however, care. And he considers. “Andrew—”

“I know.” All agreement, no argument. It always makes it harder, when Andrew is willing to talk, because so much of their relationship is built on the towering foundations of the times they are not. He silences the buzzing under his skin and in his brain with the softness of Andrew’s hair, sliding his fingers through it as Andrew moves to stand. “I’ll keep an eye on the sheriff,” he promises.

There isn’t a promise made between them yet that’s been broken, and only one of them was to protect Neil. “I know.”

It’s a werewolf’s effort to get the window open, and Neil strongly suspects that windows on the third floor of a flat cement building were never intended to be entirely functional; the metal of the sliding sill whines low and agonized, all but frozen from disuse, but Andrew pops the screen off with ease. He doesn’t leave, not yet. “Tomorrow.” It’s a commend. A question.

 _Yes,_ Neil almost says, because that’s always going to be his answer. “Tomorrow,” he says instead, because he thinks of everything he’s seen or survived, he’s most afraid of always. Andrew meets his gaze, and disappears into the night.

Neil closes the window and leans his forehead against the glass; it’s cold, and solid, and feels more real than anything else that’s happened in the last day. Behind him, Katelyn is an almost forgotten frozen form in his bed. There’s so many answers he owes her, and he can’t think of a single place to start. “Katelyn,” he drags himself back to her, though every part of him is tugging him south, after Andrew. Toward home. “Katie, listen.”

Her back is to him, and the blanket is over her ears. “Tomorrow,” she echoes, voice frozen and fragile like the glass – he recognizes terror. It sounds exactly like he feels.

The next morning, she kisses the scars on his cheek on her way to breakfast and tells him that she can meet him in Beacon Hills that afternoon if he doesn’t mind the company. “Yeah,” he agrees, a weight in his gut and a lie on his tongue, “yeah. I’ll see you there.”

He makes his decision before he’s realized there’s one to be made.

He leaves his wallet, his phone charger, the keys to the Jeep and the house in Beacon Hills in the top drawer of his desk; it’s the one he always half-jokingly says has everything in it, even though it’s mostly odds and ends of office supplies. Katelyn will know to look there, or Kevin, or Andrew. He leaves behind the parts of Neil Josten that tie him to his name. He doesn’t leave a note.

At first it’s because he doesn’t know that he’s leaving, and by the time that he does there’s barely time at all to grab his backpack and the few belongings he thinks he’ll need and get out of town before any of them realize he hasn’t made it home. Clothes, mostly, jeans and jackets and boots that he knows he can move in, can find some protection from sharp edges or sudden weather.  That he knows won’t stand out. The basic toiletries, only the ones that can’t be replaced at gas stations along the road – the good shampoo that Allison has made him use since he was fifteen stays behind. A few pieces of silver, scraped sharp and lethal, that curl like rings around his fingers. Two of his most useful books, and the binder that his mother left behind.

He doesn’t take the key to a house that burned down before he ever knew its inhabitants, the one that came with a promise and a family attached.

He wants to. Wants to dig it into his palm until he can recreate the image in his flesh, wants to feel the familiar ridges and points biting his fingers when he’s alone, wants it burned like a brand into his body like the man who gave it to him – he _wants_. He wants so much, and knows he can’t have any of it, and somehow in the second of time where he squeezes one last outline of a home made only for losing into his hand he decides that taking that with him feels too much like he’s never coming back.

(And maybe he’s not, but he hopes some part of these pieces will tell them, tell  _Andrew_ , that he never intended it to be that way.)

As he stands in the parking lot behind the farthest building on campus, the very boundaries of the territory he has claimed as his own, he holds out his arms to show that the only thing he carries is the pack on his back and turns in circles, trying to find the eyes he _knows_ must be watching. “Come and get me,” he screams himself hoarse into the quiet. “Come and get me, you son of a bitch!” The bushes rustle. “You couldn’t kill me before, you worthless mutt, and that was before I knew you were coming. You fucked up. So fucking stupid, like I always knew – I’d say ‘catch me if you can,’ but we all know you _can’t_.”

The trees snap and snarl behind him as he takes off on foot.

* * *

The emergency cash he keeps pressed into the lining of the binder, replaced from the accounts that his mother set up for their escape from Baltimore, gets him five different Greyhound tickets to five different destinations, all in different directions. It also gets him a ride, and no questions asked, in a tomato truck headed back home to Indiana. He takes it as far as the California state line, and he bunks down in a Motel 6 with just enough battery left for a single explanation.

The phone is a weight in his hands that he does not think he can manage. Neil is strong but he is not invincible, and this—

This is his second time making a call similar to this, the coward’s way out, and there’s a dark irony to be found in the way that the only sorrow he cannot bear to cause or confront is his own. This time, however, is infinitely more difficult than the first – with Wymack there had been too many things he couldn’t say, too many words stuffed hastily back down, that there hadn’t been any room left for the heartache to linger. It was only later, in the hospital, when the creaking dam of lies and regrets had burst, that he’d felt the desperate sadness seep into his bones. With Andrew though it’s like Neil has too many things that he can finally say, too many words he’s trying to release, that he can’t find any single place to begin.

“Drew,” he manages, and then his throat closes up; aside from Neil in the too few times he allows himself, there’s been no one left alive who knows what his pack used to call him – Andrew has already lost all of the people that he’s ever asked to stay. The man who survived the fire and the forest and having everything he held dear ripped from his skin is a pieced together, fragile shell of who he could have been if things were different. If the world were kinder. Instead of the bright gold of the Japanese art he’s patched his broken bits together with rust and glass and steel, with ugly, sharp things that turn his weaknesses into weapons. (Andrew could never know, like Neil does, that it’s only after bones are broken that they regrow stronger.)

Neil’s throat closes up because Andrew has lost so much in his life that he no longer wants, and yet somehow he wants Neil.

“Thank you,” he says finally, only because he doesn’t think he’s ever actually said it. He’s grateful for the years Andrew has kept him alive, has kept him close, has given him a pack and a purpose; it may never have been Neil’s world, not truly, but it was Andrew’s— and so was Neil. _Thank you_ , he says, because it’s long past the time he should have – and because, a coward to the end, it’s easier than saying _I love you_. He feels the words like a choke hold (he _feels_ ), like all the places his body has been ripped apart and painfully stitched back together are failing, like he’s shattering apart (and sometimes, things have to be broken so they can come back stronger). Courage, and his words, fail him. “You were amazing.”

Neil hangs up the call, snaps his phone in half, and he runs.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me, wandering into the final update nine months late with starbucks: literally the giant delay in this fic getting written is just a metaphor of who i am as a person

He travels east.

He hitches rides whenever he can, whenever he feels safe enough, and takes a series of buses when he can’t; he pays only in cash, or in others’ kindness. When he does finally stop for the night he chooses the roadside motels with the least questions or concerns, checking in under a series of false names that are never his own, but always somehow belonging to the people he’s left behind (he is Wymack’s middle name and Mary’s maiden name at one, Abby’s father’s name with Katelyn’s family name at another. Sometimes he is Kevin, or David. Sometimes he is Joseph.) and he soaks himself in far too much cologne in a scent that he hates. He takes whatever measures he can to bury his path in strange behaviors and smells to keep from being tracked – by friends or enemies alike.

On the third day, he gets to Salt Lake City and he buys a pay by the minute cell phone at a large chain drugstore. He buys the minutes at a different store across town. With the smallest amount loaded onto his card, he dials a number from memory.

“Who is this?”

The threat of tears comes like an assault as soon as Neil hears his voice, achingly familiar across the line. It’s been three days of restless rest and running away and the bone deep chill of paranoia, and even though there’s a phone and an unknown number of miles between them, he sounds too much like _home._ “Who is this?” he asks again, the growl in his voice palpable, and it’s all too comforting in its familiarity – Neil can’t muffle the whimper that escapes, the weakness of facing everything he’s left. “Who the _fuck is this_?” he snarls, and there’s a feral, frantic note to his words now. Neil can finally, after all this time, recognize the sound of someone being _hunted_.

“Seth,” and it takes everything he has left to get the words out. “Seth, I need you.”

* * *

Twelve hours later they pull up to a nondescript apartment building in the part of town where the college students live, where noises and crowds are all too common, and Seth parks in front of an outdoor stairwell. At least three of the doors on the first floor alone are propped open, a sea of voices inside quieting as one two four or more young people their age lean out to watch the comings and goings. A few smile or wave when they see Seth, and others whisper amongst themselves at the stranger he’s with. Seth leads the way to the third floor, a low, flat sort of third floor that Neil knows Seth could easily survive a jump from relatively unscathed, and greets the neighbor couple through their open door.

“Hey Brian,” one of them greets lazily; they’re both sprawled across a beat-up couch in the living room, sharing a joint. Neil doesn’t have a werewolf’s senses but his nose is _burning_ , full of ash and incense and marijuana, and he fights the unfamiliar urge to hug Seth for being so clever – anyone, any _thing_ close to the building wouldn’t be able to smell a scent beyond stale carpets or cheap thrills, and Seth might have left his pack after less than a year of lessons but the fact that he’s never been found shows how much he’d learned in that time.

“Hey Dakota,” Seth offers back, equally lazy. “Hey Vince.” He sounds softer here than he ever did back in Beacon Hills. Happier. Like maybe it wasn’t a matter of ever fitting in so much as simply finding a place. “This is my cousin.” He doesn’t volunteer a name or any other qualifiers, any explanations as to why they look nothing alike or that he even exists, but neither of the pair blink. Neil wonders if maybe Seth has mentioned a family before, in passing, just in case.

“Hey,” he greets them warily; the nervous energy in his brain is the pounding of his panicked heartbeat against his skull, is the scratch at the back of his neck that feels like being watched. “I’m Adam.”

Dakota smiles and nods her head in the vacant, subconscious way of the already distracted; her hair is the shade of light blonde that Neil knows comes from a bottle and her eyes are the shade of light grey that reminds him of memories. She looks like she’s a person fading away, halfway washed out, but she has a kind smile. “Wanna hit?” she offers, patting the couch beside her.

He definitely doesn’t, and he knows that if he sits down he might crumble entirely under the enormous weight of the decision he’s made. “Thanks,” he aims for sincere, and doesn’t think she would notice if he misses, “but nah.” She bobs her chin and slides her gaze, and Neil follows Seth to the neighboring apartment.

Two sets of keys open the two different locks on the security door, and the windowsills have familiar runes scratched into the wood beneath the haphazard notches of disrepair and disguise. Neil thinks he can probably lay on the floor in the middle of the room and stretch his limbs across both the living room and the kitchen, and probably brush his toes against the doorway leading back to the bathroom and bedroom. He doesn’t, but he walks the distance anyway in measurement. It’s not large, but it’s clean – Seth had always been obsessively organized.

Seth leans against the wall, but doesn’t close the door; they might never have had much in common but they’ve always had this, the way an open door meant even the smallest chance of survival. “So,” he starts, but doesn’t finish. Neither of them asks what’s brought them both all the way out here, stranding themselves on the salt flats three states from home. They both know the answer. “You come all the way out here just to tell me I was right?”

The tight, tired muscles in his back slowly loosen. Seth is not family but he is pack; it’s enough. “No.”

He grins. It’s like his skin fits him better out here, like everything he left back in California was only holding him back. “But I was right?”

For the first time in five days, Neil laughs. It’s enough. “Yeah,” he leans against the wall, against Seth. “You were right.”

* * *

The explanations come over breakfast, murmured with feigned casualness into burnt black coffee. “He came to Chico,” Neil says first, and thinks that maybe he should specify who _he_ is. He watches the slow blink of Seth’s face, eyes flashing gold, and thinks that maybe he doesn’t have to. “And then he went home. Left an eyeball on Wymack’s front porch, and a murdered student’s entrails at the old house.”

That had come later, in the time between when he should have been leaving and when he destroyed his phone. The text had come from Jean, not Andrew, which told Neil exactly how on edge this had made everyone.

Seth swallows heavily. “You have such good taste in men,” he says, lips twisted in a way that says anything but, and doesn’t ask about Allison. He doesn’t ask about any of them, his brother or his parents or the pack, but he fills Neil’s cup when it gets low and he watches his back as he walks the too-short hall to the bathroom, and he drove nine hundred miles round-trip on nothing more than _I need you._ He doesn’t act like he still cares about any of them, but Neil knows he does.

They might all be made of broken, rough edges, but Seth’s still fit against theirs.

“He came to Chico,” Neil says again, burning away the bitterness of his words with that of the coffee, hot and sludgy with grounds, “and then he came to Beacon Hills, and then he was going to come for the pack. So I—”

Seth growls, low in his throat. “You didn’t.”

“I told him in front of his entire pack that he was a useless son of a bitch who was going to choke on his own irrelevance, and then I told him to prove me wrong. I told him that he would be too stupid to find me even if I drew him a map, and then I ran.”

There’s a minute or two of silence, tense and tenuous, and then Seth cackles. “God damn it, Josten,” he forces the words out through braying, bark-like laughter, precariously balanced on the edge of hysteria. Seth had left them without a second thought in the first two weeks after the attack, the same hint of madness in his words thrown like a grenade over his shoulder as he boarded a Greyhound bus to parts unknown. He had told them they were all going to die. He had told them he refused to be taken down with them.

(He had told Allison that it wasn’t like there was anything for him in this tiny fucking town anyway, not since his brother left, and that maybe if she was as smart as everyone pretended she was she would have realized that by now.)

“God fucking damn it,” he says again, and he grabs the back of Neil’s neck in a painful, ruthless grip. “And you brought him right the fuck to me.”

Neil refuses to avert his stare, and grins unrepentantly; it would be a challenge, if either of them thought of the other as anything but an equal. Instead, it’s an acknowledgement. “You’re the only one I know who refuses to die for me. Way I see it, you’re the safest place to be.”

* * *

Seth might be more comfortable in Fort Collins, more free, but he doesn’t have any more attachment to it than he hadn’t to Beacon Hills; he packs a bag, and another for Neil, and he closes the door of his small student apartment one last time. “So,” he says as he slides behind the wheel of the ugly as fuck 1998 Suburu they purchased in cash from an ad Neil found on Craigslist, “what’s the plan?”

There isn’t one. There is. _Stay alive_ , his mother used to tell him. _Keep moving_. Or maybe it was the other way around, keep moving and stay alive, like maybe they were a sequential order. It didn’t matter anymore. She’d kept moving, and he’d stayed alive. Unrelated. “Pick a direction,” he says instead, “and start driving.”

They travel the roads of the neighborhood slow with indecision, like maybe Seth’s not ready to leave – or, more likely, he’s not ready to _run_. It’s only when they’ve finally passed the same corner market for the third time that Neil intervenes, reaching over to jerk the wheel to the right, bumping them painfully into the grocery store parking lot. “What the fuck,” is Seth’s half-hearted argument, but he slows the brakes and brings them to a quiet, gentle stop. “If you wanna fucking drive, just say so.”

“Riko is coming for me,” Neil states very calmly, and wrenches the gear shift into park, “And when he catches me, he’s going to kill me.” He lays the words out like simple, known facts because they _are_ – these are truths that Neil has accepted since that night in the forest, and reminded himself of every day since waking up in the hospital. The moon changes, monsters are real, and Neil is alive until he is not. Acknowledging these things makes them less terrifying. “That can’t be helped. I’m over it.” Seth opens his mouth, an unwanted reassurance tiptoeing to the front, so Neil barrels on. “But _after he kills me_ , he is going to come for every last member of my pack and family. The longer I’m able to keep running, the longer the rest of you have. Now, pick a direction, and _drive_.”

Seth flips him off as he shifts back into drive, and turns onto the road leading north.

“Why me?” he asks hours later. Seth had gotten them onto I-25, but they’d switched drivers in Casper; Seth sprawls across the passenger seat loose-limbed and angry, his body as far from Neil’s as the small space allows. They’re only an hour or so outside of Billings, and Neil doesn’t do much beyond hum a soft noise for elaboration in response. Seth groans. “All that shit you said, about how we’re all gonna die. Why the fuck did you come to me? I’m not the one who’s gonna keep you alive.”

Neil laughs; it’s a startled laugh, real in the way of the snorting, unexpected laughs. “I never once thought you would,” he says it fondly though, just another one of the truths in his universe.

“Then why me?” Confusion has smoothed the roughness from Seth’s voice, from the way he leans toward Neil now instead of away.

It’s another ten minutes before Neil responds, and they pass the time in an uncomfortable silence. “Because I’m going to die,” he paces the words to the sound of tires on asphalt, of miles disappearing behind them, because he can no longer pace them to the beating of his heart. It pounds fast and heavy with fear. “There’s no other way this story ends. And when Riko comes for the others, maybe they’ll survive if they can work together. Maybe they’ll all die together. I don’t know. All I know,” he knows many things. Many truths. The only one that matters is that right now they are all alive, and maybe he can keep them that way another day longer. “Is that when Riko comes for the pack, they’ll be together, and you’ll be alone.”

Seth closes his mouth like he’s been shot, drawing it tight and thin and pale at the edges; he looks like he’s swallowed a bomb, or maybe like he’s just swallowing his pain. “I’m with you,” he croaks out, the cracks in his voice making the words sound sharp and rough like a threat. “Guess that means I’m dying second.”

Possibly. Probably. That wasn’t the point he was trying to hone. “I’m with you,” Neil tells him simply, like a fact. “Guess that means we’re dying together.”

* * *

Neil gets them across the border with a few handfuls of cash and a few cashing ins of old favors owed to his mother – throwing around the name Hatford goes a lot farther than the money does as soon as they’re officially out of the United States. He doesn’t know any of her contacts in Regina, aside from the hastily scrawled stores and bars in the book she’d left (when he was younger, back when her leaving was still fresh and her handwriting still familiar, he’d read through the diary at least twice a day, desperate for some coded message that explained why she had gone or a promise that she would return or even just that she loved him. There wasn’t one. As the years went by he came to realize that the book was nothing but an outdated address book of overseas contacts that she didn’t trust enough to call, and that no thought of him had gone into her leaving.), only that most of them have either passed on or moved on.

Their first two stops yield nothing but frustration and Seth bitching about how cold it is, like it hadn’t been just the same late-October winter back in Montana, but Neil admits to himself as he digs himself deeper into the hooded jacket that is not nearly sufficient for this that he agrees.

It’s colder suddenly, the air crisp and clean in a way that feels almost foreign in their lungs. Or maybe it’s just that they can finally breathe. The target he feels draped across his shoulders like a cross of his own making is still there – he feels it in the way he still can’t sleep more than an hour at a stretch, the way he can’t shake the feeling of being watched even when Seth swears they’re alone, the way he smuggled himself out of the country with the aid of a few seasoned criminals and _still_ can’t help but think every moment is somehow going to be his last – but it’s less here. He doesn’t sleep more than an hour at a time but he falls back asleep more easily now, and he lets himself enjoy his waking moments just a little bit more.

He resurrects the skills he hasn’t needed to remember since he was a child to get them false identities, three each, and Seth surprises him with enough technical know-how to backdate their each of their new names with a few years each of internet presence. Chris and Matt spend an entire week with a contact of his mother’s, helping out at their bar off the Trans-Canada Highway, and then Alex and Cameron leave to head east.

They spend their first full moon in a motel room outside Dauphin. It’s a last minute memory, the way both of them are tuned in to the draw of the lunar tide for two very different reasons, but somehow between everything else going on they’ve genuinely managed to forget until it’s almost too late. It could be a disaster.

But it, like so much else of their odd camaraderie forged in fear of a common enemy, is anything but.

Whatever parts of Seth spout hatred of Neil and refusal of the pack vanishes in the bright disc of a moon behind the clouds and the eruption of coarse hair across his brows, and he huffs a few low breaths before he meets Neil’s gaze full on. “Oh,” he whispers quietly, voice sounding strange. Like he doesn’t know how his mouth works, or where his teeth are. “Oh, I... I forgot.”

Like he doesn’t know how his mouth works, not like this at least, because he probably doesn’t. It’s been quite a few full moons since Seth left the pack, and it doesn’t seem that he spent them, well, _him_.

Neil doesn’t bring it up. Their bond, like Seth’s voice, is a string too fragile to survive being plucked; instead, he reaches out and tugs the longest of the hairs growing from Seth’s cheek. “You know,” he says calmly, and ignores the clawed hand that swats out at him in casual fury. It’s the same way he’s managed years of moons at Kevin’s side now, or Andrew’s when he keeps himself even slightly human – by reminding them that he might not be like them, but deep down, they’re all still like him. “Other than the terrible sideburns, you don’t look any different.”

“If I kill you,” Seth snaps teeth just this side of seriously in the air near Neil’s shoulder. If he meant it, he wouldn’t have warned him first. “I get to go home. Think about _that_ , asshole.”

Neil snaps in return, blunt and human, but leans his weight to knock their shoulders together; Seth makes a disgruntled noise of comfort when he doesn’t move away, like he hates how happy it makes him. “Home?” he asks slyly, around a grin that’s more of a snarl than anything. “You don’t mean that shithole in Colorado.”

“Fuck you,” Seth growls again, voice gone low and rough with more than just the change; there’s sadness in both of them whenever they indulge enough to mention home. Neil for a place he can’t return, and Seth for one he hasn’t found yet. And then, softly, “I miss Patrick.”

His brother. Neil leans closer. “Yeah,” he agrees, “I miss Kevin.”

Sentiment carries them both through to morning, and when Seth disappears into the bathroom to shower the last remnants of the moon and the wild from his skin, Neil allows sentiment to carry him into a familiar pattern of numbers dialed into the room’s ancient corded phone. “Hello?” Kevin asks, rough and groggy – it’s just approaching dawn in Beacon Hills, right at the time when most of them are stumbling from one skin and into another. The perfect time to pass it all off as a dream.

“Don’t let them know it’s me,” Neil whispers, and hears something break in the background. It might be the phone. More likely, it’s Kevin’s heart.

Ragged breathing over the line quickly crystalizes as Neil’s; he hadn’t known he was that close to breaking until it happened, quietly and without ceremony, into his brother’s ear. Kevin allows him the few moments to come apart entirely, and then helps him come back together. “Hey Abbs,” he says softly. Gently. The way he has never spoken to Abby, but the way she always speaks to him – like someone terrified of frightening away the fragile thing they’ve coaxed into their home.

“I’m alive,” he whispers again, both actions redundant. They can’t hear him but the others must know it’s not Abby, not with the way Kevin is acting, and they must know he’s alive because he is calling. “Did Katie make it—”

“Yeah,” Kevin whispers in return, the way they used to when they were younger and they would share the couch or the treehouse or the set of bunk beds they eventually grew out of. “Katelyn’s here, Allison’s here, we’re all—” A sigh hiccoughs into a cough hiccoughs into a sob. He thinks, when all of this is over – whenever that may be. The end of the road is either an endless path or a house in the woods or a swift death at a clawed hand. It’s been three weeks and he already doesn’t care which it is. – that he just might never use a phone again. They’ve too recently become symbols of misery, and of loss. “We’re all here.”

“I’m not.” Redundant.

Kevin laughs, or snarls, or cries. “No, you’re not. Where the fuck even are you?”

Four kilometers outside of Ashville. “Fuck if I know,” he lies easily. “All I know is we’re about three days ahead of Riko, and we’re trying to make it four.”

By now the silence over the line has turned to the weighted, impatient silence of the pointed stares he know Kevin must be receiving. Maybe even some very furious, very real threats. All he knows is that if he calls them again he’ll do something stupid like go home to them, so he very quietly promises himself to never let it happen again. “Neil,” Kevin says deliberately – it’s not to let the others know who’s on the call. They _must_ know by now. Instead, it’s to let Neil know that he gets it. – He doesn’t say _be careful_ , and he doesn’t say _come home_. He knows that Neil will do both as long as he is able, because Neil has been one step from running from the very moment they met. “I love you.”

The third time is, apparently, the charm. “Love you too, Kev.”

He hangs up the phone before anything more can be said and meets Seth’s tired, knowing eyes. With quiet, careful gestures, Seth hands him the keys and leads him to the car.

* * *

James and Ben spend two weeks in Manitoba. Sam and Devin spend three in Nunavut. Everywhere they go they are brothers, or cousins, or a pair of college students looking for work. They survive on each other and on the kindness of strangers, and when they have no where else to go they look up one of the names left behind in his mother’s tidy hand and they call in favors they’re never sure will be cashed.

It seems like it should be a lonely few weeks, but it’s anything but.

One of his mother’s contacts is a woman in her early forties – it strikes Neil as strange that he doesn’t know whether or not his mother would be the same age. Whatever birthday of his mother’s he might remember, he doubts that it’s true. – who welcomes them into her home like they’re old friends. Her three children, all younger than Seth and Neil, teach them the latest video games and spend a long weekend thoroughly destroying them on the X-Box. She bids them farewell with a sad smile and a cooler of prepared meals, and pulls a promise from them both that they will visit again whenever they can.

A grandfather finds them in the Northern Territories and refuses to let them go on until they have warmed up by his fire, and rested a night in the slanted front room of his ancient mobile home. He makes them neon macaroni and cheese from a box that tastes exactly like home used to, before the wolves came, and piles the floor with heavy quilts that his late wife had made.

They collect names and keychains from every place they stop, because Neil and Seth might never be found out here in the frozen wilderness, but they were _here_. For the brief moments of time between conversations and scattered handiwork and small towns, they _existed_.

David and Anthony spend an entire month in Joliette.

Any intentions of passing through are shattered by the snow that piles at the door of the restaurant they stop for dinner in and the full moon that wavers through the sludge of clouds like a reflection through their hotel room window. Neil watches the second movie in a trilogy that he’s never heard of entirely in French while Seth sleeps fitfully beside him, and in the morning there’s a curt knock at the door that has them both eyeing the bathroom window for size. “I know you’re in there,” calls the softly accented voice from beyond the door. “I can smell you.”

Her name is Elodie, and she’s the local alpha’s mother.

She settles their bill at the hotel and bustles them back to the pack’s house in the same soft, insistent way she welcomed herself into their room, keeping up a steady stream of conversation they understand perhaps two-thirds of, and when the door opens to a table laden with calories and the pack about to inhale them, she grins a quiet grin and announces that they will be staying.

It’s different than Beacon Hills. The Joliette pack is a family first, three generations sharing a sprawling home, and they have never known loss or suffering. Their children are born into the world of wolves, not savaged into it, and their human siblings or partners are simply another aspect of their idea of normal. They regard Seth – _Anthony_ – as something foreign and exotic; they’ve never seen a made wolf before. Over breakfast and too many tiny cups of espresso, they ask him a series of questions in varying levels of Franglish that boil down to essentially wondering if he’s somehow an alien, or maybe a superhero.

The alpha, Marc, takes Neil aside after they’ve eaten their fill and formally invites them to stay.

“Wolves on their own go mad,” he tells Neil kindly, paternally, when Neil politely turns him down. “Your friend, he needs a pack. A touchstone.”

Neil draws himself up to his full height of somewhere in the vicinity of Marc’s left shoulder, and he does not avert his gaze. “Anthony has a pack.” He thinks of the way Allison still wears his hoodie when she used to curl into Neil’s bed for a movie night, and the way Erik and Jean always left a space for him on the couch. The way that sometimes Kevin would turn to the side away from Neil, the one that had somehow become Seth’s, to say the punchline of a joke before he remembers there’s nobody there. How Robin hasn’t played Luigi’s Mansion in over a year because she promised him they would finish it together. Mostly, he thinks of how Seth will always be _theirs_ , even if they are no longer his. “And he has me.”

Marc tilts his chin, considering. Finally, he laughs. “You’re a strange one, David. You and your friend are welcome to stay with us as long as you need.”

* * *

They stay one full cycle of the moon, guilty in the way they’ve drawn this happy little family into their war, and then they make their excuses. Marc seems sad to see them go, as much as Seth looks sad to leave; Neil thinks that, if there wasn’t some stubborn part of Seth that refused to let himself be loved, he would have stayed forever. Instead, he slowly detangles himself from three generations of his second family, and he goes to pack their things into the car.

Elodie latches a hand around Neil’s wrist, and she draws him into the solitude of her kitchen. “Charleston,” she says like a command, and waits for the confusion that slowly bleeds across Neil’s face. “There is talk,” she whispers now, fierce and desperate. Elodie is a woman who has seen a world at war and survived, and a woman who has built her family up from the ashes. In a way, she’s the only one of these Joliette wolves that Neil understands. “Of a rogue wolf. He was cast out from a larger pack in New York, and he kills alphas for their power.” The grip on his wrist switches now to his palm, squeezing the delicate bones there with strength she seems to have forgotten he does not possess. “His gang calls West Virginia their territory. They are a small pack, and without allies. They’re looking for him.”

He blinks. It’s more than he’s found out than he ever did back in Beacon Hills, desperately scouring the country for where they might have come from or might be heading next. More than they’ve gotten in the last few months on the road. “Thank you,” he squeezes her hand back as hard as he can, as hard as he’s able.

Her eyes look at him with all the wisdom of her eighty-one years, and then she bows her head. “Be safe, David Hemmick.”

* * *

Neil wakes up in the quiet suburbs of Montreal, tired of running.

Not of running – of being chased. He wakes up tired of looking over his shoulder, of counting shadows, of never taking a full breath or a full shower or a full meal or a full night’s sleep because maybe, just maybe, those tiny indulgences will be where death catches up. He wakes up, alive and angry, and thinks that maybe, just _maybe_ , he’s had this whole thing wrong from the beginning. “Fuck this,” he tells the heavy presence of Riko that’s haunted the last few months of his life, and a little bit the werewolf that startles into alertness beside him. “Fuck _this,_ I’m done running for my life.”

There’s a yawn buried shallowly beneath the response. “You quitting on me, Josten? Going home?” Seth asks him, curious but content – like he’d understand it. Like he’d be okay with.

Not like he’d go with him.

There’s a sudden surge of affection for the man who sprawls across the bedspread behind him. They’d never been close back in school, never been much of anything really – Seth was Allison’s until he wasn’t, and Neil was the one who picked up the pieces he left behind. – but there’s something to be said for what they are now. Battle-born. Desperation, maybe, clinging to each other like the only other drowning man in the ocean. He doesn’t think they’re friends, but somewhere over the thousands of miles between here and home, Neil thinks he’s found room in the jagged fortress of his family for at least one more.

“You’re stuck with me,” he says instead, and tries not to think about the way they both stifle a soft _whoosh_ of relief into the silence. “But I’m tired of running from Riko. I say,” he grins. “I say we give him something to run _from_ instead.”

Seth groans. “Josten,” and the name is the same growl from high school, the same snarl that shoved him into lockers to see if he fit. “Do _not_ tell me that you want to go _find_ that psycho.” It’s been a long week, and Neil offers a little bit of agreement: he says nothing. It’s answer enough. Seth bullies him to the very edge of the bed with a combination of increased strength and well-aimed elbows, and pulls his pillow over his face. “Have I told you recently that I really fucking hate everything about you?”

“Every damn day.”

The pillow moves, like Seth is nodding his agreement. “Good,” comes the muffled, cottony-sounding response. “Because I really fucking do.” 

* * *

It’s only an eleven-hour drive to Charleston – _only_ eleven hours, when they’ve been on the run for just about as many weeks now, when they’ve left two countries and thousands of miles in their rearview mirror. Neil thinks, with a cup of coffee for each of them, they can make it without stopping.

Instead, they wind through the Vermont winter like tourists in an earlier season.

It only makes sense, he supposes, though he rants and rails the first day of travel that Seth keeps him confined to the passenger seat. Maybe it’s a good plan to face Riko head on, to meet him in his own game – maybe it’s a terrible idea, a much faster suicide than running, but even that would be better than the zero sum of the last few months. If it’s a game they intend to play, to _win_ , then Seth’s deliberate tripling of the distance is probably the only smart choice about it all; he lets Neil spit salt and vinegar for three entire days, and then he pulls off the road in the parking lot of a small motel closed for the season and offers him the wheel. “So,” he grins lazily from the backseat – he hasn’t slept since Neil woke him that morning in Montreal, hasn’t let either his companion or their car keys out of his sight, out of the mistrust that none of it would be there when he woke up – and closes his eyes. “What’s the plan?”

“Fuck you,” Neil answers without answering, because he’d rather die than tell Seth he was right. “I don’t hear you chiming in with any ideas, Mr. Assistant Captain.”

Sophomore year feels like another world entirely – when he thinks back to where they all started, a handful of dumbass kids on their high school lacrosse team, he thinks he might tip fully over the edge of the vortex into insanity. It’s only been three years and a handful of months since the night where everything changed, but it may as well be a lifetime. Several lifetimes. He’s long accepted that magic is real and so are monsters, but he can’t reconcile any part of who he was at the age of sixteen with anything he is now.

Seth must have the same level of disconnect from their existence pre-wolves, because instead of rising to the taunt he only stares at Neil like he’s trying to figure out if it’s even aimed at him. Then he laughs, a short barking sound as he throws his head back, and stretches out in across the bench seat for a nap. “Oh shit,” he snorts, “I forgot that was even a thing.”

“I was so pissed,” Neil grins in return. It was supposed to be him and Kevin, like everything else was at that point – NeilandKevin and KevinandNeil, carving out the commas between them the same way that the entire town had carved out space for the too-scrawny orphan boy that had been left on their collective doorstep. But instead the year had begun with Kevin and _Seth_ – and Neil might have argued it once, but time and experience and enough removal from caring had him the first to admit that he had far too much an authority issue to ever be a figure of authority himself – and ended with Kevin and Seth and Andrew and Robin and Jean and Erik… and Neil, left to the sidelines in more than one regard. It’s surreal, comparing then to now.

Seth kicks his leg over the armrest of the passenger seat, waggling his foot in time to the song that’s played at least eight times already this morning. “You wanna hear something crazy?”

Their high school sports rivalry ended sharply and suddenly as first one and then the other of the team’s captains was turned into a werewolf, and sometimes they all spent weekends at the apartment of a man charged with his brother’s murder where they would eat pizza and do magic. “Yeah,” Neil agrees quickly. Excitedly. “Yeah I wanna hear something crazy.”

There’s a pause, and then another bark of laughter, like Seth knows what he was thinking; the idea of crazy has long sense expanded its borders for them. “I fought for it to be you.”

“What?”

There’s a creaking of joints and a little bit the seat, and then Seth is sitting upright; he leans his elbows on either side of Neil’s headrest, caging him in. It doesn’t feel like a threat. “I told Coach that it should be you, not Kevin. We argued for like a week. Kev might be the better player, but you’re smarter. I mean, fuck, Jean played offense for _how_ long before you said we should try him as a defender?” Once upon a time, a lifetime and not very long ago at all, Neil remembers how not getting the captaincy and later cut from the team was one of the most important events of his life. Now, with everything that’s happened and everything he’s become, he doesn’t even remember what position _he_ used to play, let alone Jean. “Brilliant, dude.”

Neil hmms and tilts his head, tapping it against Seth’s elbow. “I don’t remember any of that,” he admits. “That’s the crazy thing. I probably didn’t sleep for a week when Coach gave you the A, and now it’s like—”

“Like who the fuck cares,” Seth finishes.

Neil taps again. “Like who the fuck cares.”

* * *

It’s only eleven hours to Charleston, but they don’t drive them.

Something about this feels too easy, too _convenient_ , for either of them to commit to the route. Seth blames the fact that it’s two of them – one, really, because Neil might be pack but he’s also a human, and as much as this is his fight he’s not likely to win it if he tries – against at least five, all of them insane. Charging into another pack’s territory might work for a full group of wolves, but for them? They spend a week and change winding nearly all the way down to Myrtle Beach before the nagging feeling at the back of Neil’s skull finally gains a voice.

“I never used the name Hemmick.”

It’s Seth’s turn to drive; he doesn’t look away from the road, but he angles his head toward the passenger seat. “What?”

“Elodie.” It’s something that didn’t seem strange at the time, not in the way they’d been all but adopted into at least the family, if not the pack itself. By the end they’d even been Dave and Tony, and Elodie had called them her boys. They might not have known where they grew up or who they were running from, but the Joliette pack had known enough that the final parting had seemed normal. Kind, even. Until now. “She called me David Hemmick, that day we left. Only I never told her that name, and neither of us ever said Beacon Hills.”

Seth slows enough for a lane change, and signals to exit the interstate. “You think they’re somehow connected to Riko?”

The thing is, he doesn’t. “No. I don’t know. I don’t think so. It’s just—”

Weird. It’s weird.

“Do you think—” Seth huffs out a breath and changes lanes again, this time to the fast lane. The exit blurs past them. “Do you think she knew us?” When Neil turns his head, alarmed, Seth holds out one hand in a placating gesture and tries to find the words to explain. “Andrew’s pack, like the old one… they were old, right? We know they had friends, maybe she’s one of them. Maybe she knew what was up.”

The information they’d received before, when they had first survived Riko, had come from some childhood friends of Andrew’s aunt now based out of Montana, not Canada. But they’d also been in Beacon Hills for about a hundred years before the fire, and they must have known more than just three people in the time, and— “I don’t know, maybe?” Seth snorts. “Why are you even asking me? The most I know about werewolf alliances is how to make enemies.”

“And you do it so well,” Seth agrees, earning a short choke of laughter and a punch to his arm. Once again, they ignore any exit that might turn them toward West Virginia.

* * *

Neil pulls a stop on a patch of grass just outside the city limits, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel in time to a rhythm that only he can hear; the radio has been off for the last two days, and Seth makes it an entire two minutes before he breaks. “What is it, Josten?”

It’s nothing, or at least it should be. “I just... there’s something I have to do.”

The East Coast might have been the place he’d been born and raised for the first part of his life, but he’s never been this far South – the Wesninski empire was more New England than Eastern Seaboard, and there hadn’t been enough south for him and Mary to flee through before they landed in California. There’s not much of anything for him here, or there shouldn’t be. But South Carolina was where Andrew and Aaron and Erik ended up after the fire, and Greenville is only about an hour and a half from Columbia, and—

“It’s... It’s Nicky.”

Seth looks at Neil like he’s speaking a foreign language suddenly. “Nicky?” He laughs, dry and arid like the deserts they’ve left far behind; it is not a kind laugh, nor a particularly humor-filled one. “I swear to god, Neil, if you dragged me to the swampy south for some internet girlfriend of yours—”

“What?” Seth’s words catch up to their implied meaning right around the time they reach their exit on the highway, and it’s a bit of a careening lane change for them to make it. “What the _fuck_ , Seth, Nicky is Andrew’s _cousin_ , he—”

He falters. It’s not his story to tell.

“You know about the fire?” Everyone from Beacon Hills over a certain age knows about the fire – an entire family, gone in a single night? The sheriff’s office had ruled it as arson, but no arsonist had ever been caught. As far as Neil knew, they’d never even looked. It was something he wondered, more now than he had back then, why a small town had been so rocked by horrific loss but never once searched for who might be responsible. Neil had only been a child when it happened, ten or eleven. Most of what he remembered was that his mother left him just a few weeks later.

Seth nods, cowed. “Yeah.” There’s an ache in his voice that Neil hadn’t expected, but Seth was born and raised in Beacon Hills and still had that last bit of hometown in his blood. “Yeah, Josten, _fuck_ , course I know about it. _Everyone_ knows about it, my—” He bites the words into his cheek, slamming a hand against the dashboard in a sudden burst of anger. “My brother’s best friend died in that fire, man.”

Objectively, Neil knew that Seth had a brother. It’s just that he never quite considered the brother as a real person, as anything at all beyond an extension of Seth and a cause of the constant rage that burned beneath every word that flew from his lips. “I’m sorry,” he says, but he isn’t sure for what. For Seth’s brother, maybe, or just for never stopping to think that theirs was a pack of battered, broken things and maybe there had been a reason Seth found his way to them. “I didn’t know.”

“My brother lost his friend,” Seth shrugs. “They lost their entire fucking family.”

Eleven people, out of a total of fifteen. “Not their _entire_ family,” he clenches his hands around the steering wheel like an anchor, and he dives in. “Erik… he’s not actually related to Andrew. He was dating Andrew’s cousin, or married, I don’t actually know. I just know that the cousin’s parents didn’t approve, so Erik wasn’t allowed at the house.” It still doesn’t feel like much of a victory, knowing that Luther Hemmick’s homophobia had been the only thing that spared Erik that night. Not knowing as well that Nicky and Andrew still had to grow up with it. “Nicky is the cousin.”

Seth sucks in a heavy breath. “Shit, man. Erik is the only one of you fucks I actually _like_. Don’t tell me we wanna visit his husband’s grave.”

“Nicky survived.” It’s easier to lead with that, with the smallest bit of hope that was pulled from the wreckage. There wasn’t much, but there was, at least, something. Neil doesn’t have the words for what Nicky went through, after the fire, doesn’t know enough about medicine. Andrew had always glossed over the technical terms of it all, shrugging it off in the way of someone who cared far too much to allow himself to think about it. “He didn’t wake up for a really long time, and when he did he didn’t talk or respond to anything.”

“Catatonic,” Seth supplies, quietly. He’d once said that his brother was a combat medic, deployed overseas.

It sounds right. “He lives in an assisted living facility in Columbia,” and they might have left the freeway behind but the signs are still right there, a white arrow pointing their path back to I-385. It would be easy, the detour – it would be easy, but it would be stupid. They’ve already wasted enough time, meandering the country like this, and there’s too many ties between the pack and the area to linger. But also—

But also.

Neil has never met Nicky, but he knows him through Erik, and through Andrew. It’s impossible to not feel as though there’s some sort of bond pulling him closer, the way the man’s absence has been woven into the fabric of whatever family they’ve all managed to stitch together. This might be his only chance to – he’s not even sure what. Meet Nicky. Say sorry for what happened. Thank him, for what he did in Andrew’s childhood. Neil did not get to say goodbye, did not get to explain to his family or his friends where he was going or why – but he can do this. He can go to Nicky, a man who lost everything and was lost to whoever he had left years before, can check on him and maybe, _maybe_ , say the words that he owes everyone else but has never found the courage to say.

It’s an eternity before Seth answers, but he does so with a hand on Neil’s shoulder. “Sure, man. Let’s go find Nicky.”

They find Nicky on a sunlight enclosed porch, sitting alone in the corner; he doesn’t look up at their approach. “Hey Nicky,” Neil murmurs softly, waiting just outside of arm’s distance away, but his hand hovers in the air like he’s considered reaching out to the older man. He’s got a few weeks’ worth of beard and his shoulder-length curls are a few weeks removed from a wash, and the wrists exposed by the sleeves of his bathrobe look very pale, and very delicate. There’s a fragile, forgotten sort of feeling to him, and Neil makes up his mind enough to touch his fingertips against the arm rest of the wheelchair. “My name is Neil—”

Nicky startles, and reaches up to remove the earbuds from beneath his hair; they land in his lap with the distant echo of familiar music, the sort of pop songs they’d heard over and over again on their drive across the middle of the country, and he faces them with a brilliant smile. “Hey guys,” he offers, voice just this side removed from the pleasant drawl of the locals. “Are you here for group?”

* * *

Nicky – who apparently _does_ talk, with a frequency that neither of them had prepared for, and with an alarming degree of lucidity for someone they had believed to be completely catatonic – stops talking to them entirely once they tell him where they’re from.

“Okay,” the nurse who appears as soon as Nicky’s jaw snaps shut and the smile shutters from his eyes says, bearing down on them with the force of a tidal wave, “I think I need to ask you to leave.” Her hair is pulled back into a severe bun, more silver than black, but she thins her lips in the angry, protective way that Abby always does as she shoos them away from Nicky. She’s wearing a long cardigan over her bubblegum pink scrubs and a purse slung over her shoulder, like she’s either just coming on shift or just getting off, but she’s taken the time to check in with a patient before anything else. She _cares_. “I think we should give the dear boy some space.”

Seth follows along easily, pushing away from his slump against the wall to stalk after her; Neil is more reluctant to leave, now that he knows Nicky is awake, but he allows the nurse to herd him back into the hallway. “I know that visiting is usually for family only, but—”

“Nicky doesn’t have a family.” There’s steel in the soft drawl of her voice, sharp and dangerous. Her eyes do not flash when she glares him down, but they might as well – Neil should be the last to forget that humans are often as ferocious as wolves, but is usually the first. “Or, I guess, not anymore. They left.” She opens the window beside her and lights a cigarette, angling her body so the smoke drifts outward. Seth wrinkles his nose. “Used to be those boys came to see him every week, like clockwork. Then they stopped. It’s not unheard of, a family losing hope like that, only—”

She grinds the cigarette into the windowsill, and lights a second. “When he woke up, we tried alerting the family. The phone number we had on file was disconnected, and the letters we sent came back undeliverable. I even drove over to the house, but it was… We had no way of letting them know his condition had changed.”

If he had to guess, Neil thinks he could pinpoint exactly when this all happened. The end of September, three years ago. The week Kevin was bitten. The week Aaron died. “You have to understand—”

“Honey,” she touches his arm lightly, like she knows he’ll run otherwise, “after what that family went through, I wouldn’t dare judge them for any way they tried to cope. But _you_ all need to understand that Nicky gets to choose how he tries to cope, too. He’s fragile, and he’s been abandoned, and he doesn’t want to see you.” The light touch at his wrist turns to a soft squeeze, and the sharp lines around her eyes soften with a smile. “I’m glad,” she finally says. “That someone’s finally come back for him.”

He doesn’t know how to tell her that he hasn’t come here for Nicky, but for himself.

 The door opens behind them, just a crack, but the hinges creak like a welcome; the nurse looks surprised, but pleased. She stubs the last of her cigarette out, and lingers over setting her purse just so on her shoulder. “Nicholas,” she calls out when she finally has no more excuses to stay – there’s no answer. “Nicky, honey, you call me if you need anything.” Maybe Nicky doesn’t talk as much as they previously thought, because she doesn’t treat the silence as anything unusual.

Nicky is slouched in the wheelchair when they tiptoe back in, facing the door this time, and there’s distance and anger in every line of his body; Neil had forgotten, up until then, that Nicky was like Andrew – a born wolf. He may have lost more of himself than anything else to the fire, but the way he was curled now was like a predator. More a bird of prey than a wolf, perched at the edge ready for flight, but balanced for action all the same. “You smell like him,” he greets them with, the easy drawl of before flattened into something sharp. There’s none of the warmth of earlier. “Like Andrew.”

The non sequitur draws Neil short, and he turns to Seth in confusion. “I haven’t seen Andrew in _months_.”

“You do, bro.” Seth shrugs his shoulders in that way he always does when some mention of home works its way into their conversations, like he’s trying to shake off the memories before they can take root. His hands have barely left his pockets since that conversation at the side of road, his body shrinking into itself in the same angry way he used to. “I didn’t want to say anything, but—”

He knows he won’t find anything, but he reaches an arm up to sniff at the sleeve of his jacket anyway – denim mostly, and a little bit of the overpowered detergent of the laundromat back in Montpelier. Nicky cracks a smile. “It’s not like, a _smell_ smell. It’s more like,” and his eyes drift to the side and up, chasing conversations he likely hasn’t held in almost a decade. “It’s more like an... impression? Between two people who are...” He searches for the right word, like maybe he doesn’t want to presume anything. Or maybe he’s just trying to be polite. “Close.”

Seth has no such reservations. “Eau de boning,” he explains around a feral smirk, and shoves his elbow into Neil’s ribs.

He hasn’t seen Andrew in months and he definitely hasn’t _boned_ in just longer than that, but the flash of irritation he feels is more than worth it for the sudden spark of life that paints across Nicky’s face – confusion, just a moment of it, followed by a brilliant grin that takes up half of his face and takes years off his age. “No way?” he asks Seth, and then finally Neil. “No fuckin’ way.”

Andrew is three thousand miles and three months away, and there’s a killer keeping him from ever returning. “I really don’t see how that’s relevant,” he says instead of saying he doesn’t want to talk about it, because both of the wolves would seize the admission for what it is: weakness.

“It’s not,” Nicky says in return, voice flat again. For as much joy the information had first brought him, it leaves an equal lack of it when it finally sinks in. “I just never thought the bastard would ever find anyone he would go back for.”

Neil blinks. “What?”

Thin wrists disappear beneath the sleeves of a thin top as Nicky curls, retreats. “Nothing, it’s nothing. It’s stupid, it’s from—”

“Zombies,” Neil grins, remembering. “He and Renee used to have all these _plans_ , where they would go, what they would do.” It had been a Saturday trip to Redding that hadn’t seemed important until Andrew offered to let Neil drive, curling himself into the passenger seat like a much smaller man. It wasn’t until they were leaving, loaded with supplies from the Costco, that he finally offered some of the precious few words he ever did of things _Before_. Renee had been adopted into the pack when they were still in elementary school, and Aaron might have been his twin but Renee had been his _sister_ , his best friend.

            Renee, he had realized in the drive back to a town that felt more and more like home every day, had been Andrew’s Kevin.

            The empty planet of Nicky’s voice takes on a softer landscape. “He told you about that?” It’s an uncomfortable thing, here and now and with everything that’s been thrown between them, to finally realize that there’s probably very little Andrew _didn’t_ tell him about. That to the rest of the world he might seem unknowable, whereas Neil knows nothing except that he might be the only one who knows him very well. The fissures return, and Nicky is cold and craggy again. “Not that it means anything.”

            It does, but not what Nicky thinks that it does. “He still keeps a list,” he offers, because that’s one thing they _haven’t_ talked about but Neil knows better anyway. It’s just who Andrew is.

“Yeah well, it’s a list, not a fucking promise.” He retreats further into his chair, and himself. “Not that he keeps those either.”

It’s not the first time Neil has challenged a werewolf in Andrew’s defense, or even the second time. It’s become something of a habit of his, in fact, and he thinks that maybe it shouldn’t have come as such a surprise to him, this thing between them. “Was he just supposed to spend his whole life here?” he snarls as best he can with his blunted human teeth, his blunted human fury. He knows better than anyone the terrible feeling of being forgotten in some backwoods town, of waiting for someone who will never come back and missing out entirely on the way the rest of the world just spins on, uncaring. “Just supposed to stay in that house and wait to die?”

It’s all too easy to forget that Nicky isn’t a child. He might be childlike, open and innocent in the way of children, and delicate like one too, but he’s nearly a decade older than Neil is and he’s spent most of his life fighting a war against the world that’s tried to relegate his kind to a forgotten era. “Look, kid,” he snarls, and the reminder is like a punch to the face. “Don’t talk about things you don’t understand.”

He wants to laugh – he _does_ understand. “I do,” his voice is almost a whisper now, where Nicky’s is almost a yell.

“They _abandoned_ me!”

His voice breaks, shatters like glass, cuts the words to ribbons and spreads them across a too-frail lap like some forgotten offering; Nicky is a fragile thing precariously maintained. Neil knows in that moment that he might shatter at a single word and the pieces tumble over some precipice of the decade behind him. There is silence after the storm, the eerie desolate aftermath – Nicky is a natural disaster and the barren swath left behind all in one. A wolf and a man, separate and distinct. Wolves without packs turn too often to madness, untethered from the moors of any morality and taken by the moon’s tide. _They abandoned me_ , the words jerk through his body like bullets, like his voice the exit wound.

Neil is no stranger to madmen, or wolves, or weapons. “You abandoned them first.”

“I was in a fucking _coma_.”

There’s a lazy shrug that finds its way across Neil’s shoulders right around the time he finds himself with the upper hand; the baser instinct he keeps locked away is not that of an animal, but of something _worse_. “I know.” South Carolina is three thousand miles and three years from a home Neil isn’t sure he can ever see again, and he is suddenly blindingly, blisteringly furious at a world that does not think he has already lost enough. “Didn’t even have the decency to die like the rest of them. How the fuck were they supposed to mourn you when you were still here?”

Behind him, lingering like a shadow, Seth shifts his stance uncomfortably. “Jesus, Josten.”

“ _God_ ,” Nicky laughs, cold and brittle, “you even _sound_ like him.” His fingers clench the arms of the wheelchair like he would lunge forward if only his legs could bear the weight, and the soft soles of his slippered feet drag slow and wearily against the tiles. “I’d say it’s like there’s two of him now, but there’s _always_ been two of him. Even if neither of them will admit it.” The final remark is that of a brother. A father. Shy and strong and rough with fondness.

Seth freezes. “What?”

Neil is no stranger to weapons; knowing, he thinks, is the worst of them. “He’s dead.”

“ _What_?” Whatever Neil thought Nicky was, whatever he expected, he is that now: hollow.

“Aaron. He’s dead.” It’s easiest, he thinks, that he never knew him. Aaron was never more to him than a body in the forest, than a mystery to solve, than the starting point of an adventure he doesn’t quite know the destination of. “Three years now. Don’t act like you didn’t know, you _had_ to have felt it.” It bubbles out of him, bleeding like a wound – the only part of home he has left is this story. He understands Nicky’s anger more than anyone else could. “Drew’s the alpha now, and he’s alone, and Erik does his best but…” Even now, all these years later, whatever Erik is to the pack, to Andrew, he is as Nicky’s. “But he’s not—”

Grief and hope fight a desperate battle across Nicky’s face; Neil thinks it might be a good sign of things to come that hope wins. “Erik?” There’s a light in his gaze that hasn’t been there before, not even when he was erupting with anger, and the too-thin fingers twist themselves into knots in the tie of his hospital robe. “Is he—”

Neil doesn’t need him to finish. Whatever he’s asking, whatever he wants to know if Erik is, he _is_. “Oh, fuck yeah.”

“I’ve seen _Clueless_ a hundred and forty-seven times because of you.” Seth shrugs casually from the doorway, like this isn’t a revelation some years in the making. Like he hasn’t just shattered and rebuilt a man’s entire world.

The knots of his fingers turn to frenetic tapestries of worry, twisting and writhing themselves into blurring shapes and painful looking tangles of the others, of his clothing, of the _potential_. “I thought he would have—” His words twist like his hands, caught on themselves. “It’s been so long, I figured he—” Seth snorts.

“ _As if_.”

* * *

They leave Nicky some hours later, worn down. There’s still so much of him lost to the time and the trauma, still so little a person left inside, that just telling him what happened to Aaron nearly broke him a dozen times over. Then the move, and the pack, and Riko, and— When they finally allow themselves to be shooed from the building, visiting hours over at least thirty minutes ago, they have spent seven hours reliving a short eighteen months of their lives.

“Be real with me,” Seth tells him, seated at the wheel but the engine still off; the keys are in his hand, but neither of them are in any hurry. They’re _tired_. “Am I going to end up like that?”

Neil scrubs the gritty exhaustion from his eyes to no avail. “Seth, a house would have to burn down on top of you and you would have to spend like six years in a coma for you to end up like that.”

He doesn’t respond, but the two bottle openers he’d attached as keychains jingle together as though caught in a sudden wind; his hand is shaking. “ _Neil_ ,” Seth wrenches the car on with a ferocity that leaves the engine groaning, but does not put it into gear. “Nicky lost his pack, and he went crazy. Is that going to happen to me?”

It takes a moment for Neil to realize what he’s even talking about; Seth has been so much a bordering presence on Neil’s life, such a constant fixture at the very fringes, that his leaving had been both completely irrelevant and deeply disturbing. He knows that the wolves mourn the loss of what should have been another body among then, knows that Allison burned out and rebuilt like a phoenix, knows that for some reason he doesn’t understand Kevin had seemed genuinely upset at Seth’s departure. He knows all this because these people are his, and because they have felt it.

What confuses him, for that too-long moment before he remembers that Seth is _also_ a werewolf, is that he never stopped to consider that Seth would be feeling it too.

“You,” he blinks, “didn’t lose your pack?”

Seth barks out a harsh, brittle laugh, jagged like he used to be before he left Beacon Hills. “Yeah,” he agrees in a way too amenable to be sincere, because for all that they’ve driven across states together they’ve never _agreed_. “I just never had one to begin with,” he snarls, and manhandles the engine into gear. Neil doesn’t answer him, because he doesn’t know how. It took months, _years_ for Neil to realize that he was part of the pack that he spent nearly every hour of his day with, and even then it was only because he decided for himself.

He drives too fast through town back to their hotel, too angry, running a stop sign like even a second’s pause will give his buried feelings time to take root. In the parking lot, breathing hard like he’s run the distance on foot, Seth finally releases. He slumps against the seat, and stares listlessly out the front window.

“I called you,” Neil reminds him, but it’s the wrong thing to say.

“Yeah,” Seth snorts, “because I’m the one you don’t fucking mind dying along with you.” He drums his hands against the steering wheel – without rhythm, without thought, just a tap tap tapping that rises in tempo along with his breathing, and subsides like his tenuous control. “I didn’t feel it,” he finally admits, meeting his own gaze in the rear view mirror. “When Riko came. When you left. All that fear and anger, and I didn’t feel any of it.” When he finally, _finally_ turns his attention to Neil, his pupils are blown and the whites of his eyes are round and haunted like marbles. “If I were still, or like, _ever_ , I would have felt that. Right?”

He’s not the person to ask. Neil felt it, still feels it, but he’s not one of them either; he feels it because he _cares._ “You answered the phone,” he finally tries out, and finds the words fit better. “You didn’t need to do that. Some unknown Utah number? You could have ignored it.”

“I thought about it,” he admits. He might have been reluctant to leave but he hadn’t been to disappear, snapping his phone and shredding his ID with a certain sort of glee that spoke of someone familiar with starting over.

Given everything he’s learned in their time on the road together, it seems suddenly strange that he hadn’t. “Why _did_ you pick up?” Neil asks quietly. It hadn’t seemed important before, but maybe it only hadn’t been important to _him_ ; Neil is aware enough to admit that sometimes the things that drive him craziest about Kevin are the things that drive him craziest about himself – namely, the way that Kevin always thinks that everything that happens is somehow about him, or somehow his fault. Maybe sometimes, this time especially, things are a little bit about Seth too.

Seth slumps against the seat, and a little bit Neil’s shoulder. “Some unknown Utah number… Who else could it have been?” He says it like it’s simple, like it’s _easy_ , like there would have been any rhyme or reason to lead him to believe that phone call out of any other robo-call he had received, could be important.

It hits him there, in the parking lot of a roadside motel in Nowhere, South Carolina, that for everything they’ve always wondered what pack or family is, maybe it’s nothing more than this: the voice on the other side of the only phone call you have time to make. “And you answered,” Neil reminds him, like it’s the solution to every question they’ve asked.

Maybe it is. “Yeah, well,” Seth shuts off the engine, and tosses Neil the keys. “You called.”

* * *

Neil isn’t sure how Nicky gets past their perimeters and their paranoia, but sometime in the night they both jerk awake to find him seated at the foot of the bed; his hair is clean now, but pulled back into a ponytail, and he’s dressed in too-large jeans and a baggy shirt that does nothing more than accentuate how frail he is. When he sees Neil awake, he shifts his gaze to the side and his chin to the ceiling, and he _yields_. “I’m with you,” he says, rather unnecessarily. “What’s the plan?”

Neil blinks. “We didn’t invite you?”

It’s all too easy to forget that Nicky isn’t a child. But then he _smiles_ like that, sharp and just this shy of sane, and it’s a cold reminder that he’s got almost ten years on them in age and twenty-odd in experience, and that whatever world they’ve fallen into and so far survived, Nicky was born and bred for. That, with everything that’s happened, he’s _survived_. “Try and stop me,” he grins, and kicks off his shoes; he’s all bony elbows and sharp angles when he bullies his way into more than a fair share of the mattress. “So what’s the fucking plan, sunshine?”

* * *

They drive east, as far as they can get into the wilds of the Appalachians, and disappear into the woods just in time for the full moon.

Nicky explains to them, in the days leading up to it, that he hadn’t changed when he’d been unconscious; he’d been human, but barely, for what it was worth. And then Aaron had died, and Nicky had woken up, and the wolf had torn free of his body all in one terrible night – there was a nurse. Not the one who had checked in on him that day at the facility, one who worked the night shifts. She had recognized what he was, found a way to lock him away in one of the old storage rooms every month as he’d devolved into mindlessness. They don’t know what to expect of him, but they’d made the decision to get as far from civilization as they could. Just in case.

Just before nightfall, Seth grabs Neil’s arm and drags him to a stop. “You should go back to the car,” he whispers furiously, and darts his eyes toward the narrow line of Nicky’s back as it wanders through the tree line. It’s something he’s been snarling at Neil for the last eight hours, and he’s ignored it every time. “Like I get it, it’s _Nicky_ , but whatever weird mama bird feelings we feel for him? He’s gonna literally rip your entire face off as soon as he changes.”

The last truly human part of Neil, the one that’s told him he has no place in any of this since the moment it began, agrees wholeheartedly. “Seth,” and sadly that part has no control over the words that come out of his mouth, or they wouldn’t be in this mess, “if _you_ haven’t ripped my entire face off, no one will.”

“I can hear you, you know,” comes the conversational tone of Nicky’s voice some thirty feet ahead of them. They’re both too far removed from spending solid time with Erik to remember what it’s like, a mature adult werewolf. Too much of their familiarity has been colored by youth and inexperience. He doesn’t sound offended, but he doesn’t sound happy either. “And I’m not going to rip any part of you, thanks.”

Seth snarls, eyes already an electric shade of blue, and tightens his grip as he tugs Neil further behind him. “You don’t _know_ that, Nicky!” and when there’s no reply, louder, “You told us you ripped a _wall_ open!”

In the sudden hint of first moonlight behind the clouds, Nicky’s golden eyes burn like the fire he lost everything to; he appears silently only inches behind them, half-changed already. “He smells like family,” he admits around teeth that grow around the rest of him, and there’s something _settled_ about him that hasn’t been there in all the time they’ve known him. “He smells like _pack_.”

The night is cold but otherwise uneventful, and as they hike the slow and slippery path back to the car the following morning, Nicky bumps his shoulder against Seth’s and ruffles a hand through Neil’s hair, and then he offers to drive.

* * *

“Team name!” Nicky flaps a hand between he front seats, dangerously close to the gear shift, like he hasn’t had their attention from the moment he broke out of the hospital and into their hotel room. Seth groans quietly at the interruption, but ultimately indulges it – they’ve both been that way with Nicky, like he’s still broken. “We need a name for our sad orphan gang. Personally, my vote is for ‘Nicky’s Angels.’”

It’s only the fact that it’s his turn to drive that keeps Seth in the front of the car and not leaping into the back to hit him; as it is, he reaches down for the mostly empty drink bottle beside him and pitches it blindly over his shoulder with perfect, practiced aim. “Shut the fuck _up_ , Hemmick. We’re not a fucking team and we definitely don’t need a stupid ass name.” It’s another two miles of highway and two minutes of silence before the tensions breaks like the grin across his face. “My vote is for ‘Sad Orphan Gang.’”

“Not an orphan,” Neil counters. He’s been mostly sleeping since they left Hot Springs, curled against the passenger window, and he doesn’t bother opening his eyes before shifting positions – feet on the dash, knees to his chest. It doesn’t look any more comfortable than the previous hadn’t. “Nathan’s still in prison, and as far as I know my mom’s alive, she just—” She _just_. It was as simple, as confusing, as her being there one night and gone the next morning, without a word. She’d left a note for Wymack, asking him to take care of Neil, and a simple _Remember_ scrawled at the bottom for Neil. To this day he wasn’t sure if she’d run away from fear, or if she’d simply found a way out and taken in. “She abandoned me the summer before fifth grade.”

Seth pulls his eyes away from the road long enough to swat Nicky’s hand off of Neil’s arm and replace it with his own. “Neil, bro... you are so fucking tragic.”

“ _Tragic_ Orphan Gang!” Nicky slaps the back of Seth’s seat, once for each word.

“ _Yes_ ,” he slaps a matching beat into the vinyl wrapping of the steering wheel.

Neil shifts again like he disagrees, shoving his legs into the hollow against the door and nestling his elbow and ribs against the arm rest, folded in on himself. “Mutts and Sluts,” he whispers once the others have finally calmed down, and the car jerks into oncoming traffic to a sudden blaring of horns before Seth corrects.

“ _Bro_ ,” he snarls, and snorts, and Nicky crows with laughter from the back seat. “You’re definitely the mutt in this relationship,” he spits, but he’s smiling too hard for the insult to stick.

* * *

Somehow, they end up back in Columbia.

At first it’s by the accident of necessity alone; they spent a moon in the wilds and a month on the road, and now it’s either a motel and a prayer, or _this_.

This is a house at the end of a road, backing up to a field that used to be a construction site; it, like the house that stands sentinel, lies faded and forgotten. Nature has all but reclaimed the land that was once cleared for more homes, and the lawn of the house that straddles between the two worlds, feral and human, is shaggy and unkempt. It, much like the man who struggles against a sticky, unused lock with a shiny, frequently used key, looks like something that was once very loved and has been waiting a very long time to be so again.

“Are you sure we’re not gonna get the cops called on us?” Seth lingers by the car, as uncomfortable with other people’s homes as he’d been back in Beacon Hills; Seth is fine in hotels or hospitals or other places that belong to no one but the idea of leaving, but he doesn’t like houses. He had never been to Wymack’s house, and even when the pack gathered at Andrew’s apartment he always loitered by the door and made excuses for an early retreat. Neil recognizes the distrust that comes from having never had one.

Nicky glares, but in a soft, teasing sort of way. Despite his many valid reasons for maintaining a terrible attitude, he’s so far refused to do so; Nicky is _happy_ , almost inescapably so, and it’s somehow their strongest grounding influence. “It’s Erik’s house, and I’m Erik’s… well, you get the idea.”

B&Es and semantic technicalities are Neil’s strong suits; he turns his body to block their actions from view of the closest neighbor, and he grins. “It’s legal now.” When Nicky looks at him, a question on his face, he shrugs his shoulders like it’s not a big deal – for him, it’s not. He might have been born elsewhere but he’s spent the majority of his life in California, and he hasn’t spent the last eight years unconscious. “You and Erik, I mean. You can get married anywhere in the U.S.”

The door squeaks open as Nicky nods, feigned disinterest at their conversation coming in the way he examines the dusty entryway like it’s something significant. “Really?” and he might look nonchalant but he doesn’t sound it; there’s hope in his voice. “Cool, that’s definitely something I’ll need to look into if we don’t die.” They probably will, and they’ve finally accepted this fact, but even the slightest glimmer of hope gives them the idea of a finish line.

“Bro,” Seth calls out from his excursion into the living room, “we might die here before Riko even finds us.”

He’s exaggerating, of course, but the words have the desired effect; they break both Neil and Nicky out of pasts that are catching up to futures that can never be and into the here and now present, where they follow him into the house. Given that it’s been relatively abandoned for three years now, it could be much worse. Their departure for California seems planned in the way that all of the furniture is covered against dust by what appears to be bed sheets, and the trash cans and refrigerator have all been scrubbed clean. There’s no power or water when they check, but aside from the accumulation of dust particles and the stale smell of trapped air that is lifted by opening a few windows, it’s all in relatively good condition. Neil knows that Erik has a friend that checks in on the property periodically, but he’s not sure what that entails. At the very least, the house is safe and still standing, and they are inside.

“Let’s get some sleep,” Neil finally suggests because he knows Nicky won’t; he’s still weak, still healing, but he’s denied feeling anything but every time they ask. It’s only the way he goes slightly silent or the way his skin goes two shades too pale that gives him away, and the others have learned to watch out for it. It’s a few hours to moonrise, and they could all do with the rest.

Nicky nods, grateful, and gestures to a hallway beside the staircase. “I’m back that way,” he seems almost unsure, like maybe, despite the fact that it’s just the three of them here, it’s not his place anymore. “Seth, you can take Aaron’s room. First door at the top of the stairs. Neil—”

He knows. “End of the hallway,” he finishes, and pretends that the soft, fragile look on Nicky’s face doesn’t match the feeling in his chest right now.

Andrew’s room is exactly as he might have imagined it. There’s little imagination involved for most of it – Andrew has a room in his apartment in Beacon Hills that Neil has seen countless times, has spent countless hours in. The color scheme and the general layout is something that has always seemed habit rather than preference, so he’s hardly surprised by the familiar floorplan and the dark blue, almost black quilt. But this is Andrew’s room from when he started over, from the life he rebuilt after the fire, and there’s so much of his personality left behind that it’s almost like having him there.

The bookshelf is a mess, stuffed to overflowing with true crime novels and textbooks and the cheap, checkout line mysteries that Andrew has always denied reading. There’s a well-worn copy of the _Sherlock Holmes_ collection, and a blank space that Neil knows used to hold the Agatha Christie novels that were some of the few things Andrew brought with him. The desk is immaculate. There are no pictures or posters or anything on the walls, and all of the clothes in the closet are a similar spectrum of heavy fabric and dark colors.

It’s comfortable, and comforting, and feels so much like Andrew – like _home_ – that Neil all but collapses backwards onto the bed when he knees seem to give out. The room feels recognized and distant all at once, and overwhelmingly sad, and there’s an ache in his chest, fishhooks under his skin and all he wants is to burrow under the blankets of Andrew’s bed like he’s done a hundred times. All he’s wanted to do for months, in fact, to hide from the world that doesn’t make sense in the only place he knows it ever has. But this is Andrew’s space and not Andrew’s space all at once, or rather it’s Andrew’s space but it’s not _his_ Andrew, familiar and foreign all at the same time.

Finally, when the sky starts to darken and he still hasn’t slept, he steals one of the black jackets from the closet and he goes downstairs to find the others.

In the morning, after another uneventful full moon and a restless night of too little rest, they lock the house back up and quietly promise it that someone will come back for it someday. In the driveway, Nicky smiles at the too-baggy hoodie that Neil still wears, the one that doesn’t fit his shoulders and is thick and black and has a logo for a band he’s never heard of across the front, and he gives him a key.

This time, Neil brings it with him.

* * *

Finally, they make it to Charleston.

It’s a normal city in an otherwise normal part of the world, but they all know better; somewhere, somewhere here beneath the brick and mortar of a town that stands enduring against a changing world, is the heart of evil. Seth and Nicky are on guard as soon as they cross the city limits, snarling and cagey whenever a car passes or a door opens, and their worry sets of Neil’s and—

And it probably won’t be hard to find them, they way they stick out like sore thumbs. They drive down the main street at noon like they’re in an active war zone, and after the third strange look Neil finally wrenches Nicky’s arm against the wheel to drag them haphazardly to the side of the road. “I’m driving,” he orders, and there’s a slow, shuffling change in the seating arrangement while Seth stands guard against an invisible enemy before the car moves again at a much more on par with the flow of traffic pace. “Talk to me.”

Nicky’s lip curls and his eyes turn gold, but he talks. “It’s definitely another pack’s territory,” he explains, and his eyes snap to a parking lot where the slamming of a car door sounds like a gunshot, or an explosion. “But it’s weird, it’s like—”

“So you know how Beacon Hills is all Hemmick slash Klose slash Minyard pack territory?” Seth waves a hand against the flow of names like he doesn’t know, intimately so, that the pack didn’t take on a family name after the fire and instead the name of the town that rallied around it. “Well, you know how it smells different at like, the grocery store than it does at your house?” He doesn’t, and Seth remembers a moment later. “There’s the way it smells because a wolf lives there, and the way it smells because a wolf has _been_ there.” Neil nods, and Seth turns his gestures to the buildings beyond the window. “This whole fucking town stinks like there’s an entire pack here _right now_.”

Nicky snarls. Neil blanches. “But they’re not here,” he answers, or maybe asks. “Last we heard for sure, they passed through Joliette two weeks after we left.” Elodie had called him on the mobile numbers they’d left behind, just in case; she had told them of Riko’s brief visit in her soft, no nonsense tones, and had refused to let Neil feel guilty for it. _We are fine,_ she told him sternly _, we are too old and too strong a pack for him. We told him that there had been a wolf at the motel on the outskirts of town, but that it never came to us_.

A shrug like maybe they’re wrong, and Seth points down a street to their left. “Turn here. Maybe they came back.”

One left turn leads to another, which leads to a series of winding, serpentine roads that eventually end in an otherwise deserted part of town at, of all things, an old warehouse. It’s such a cliché that Neil wants to laugh, but can’t. Not when he knows what’s inside. “Well,” he smiles around a mouthful of panic, and eyes the chains on the gates and the barricaded windows on the upper levels, “I’m docking points for creativity but the presentation is superb.”

“Absolutely,” Nicky agrees, and doesn’t unbuckle his seatbelt, “this place really screams ‘you’re gonna die here.’”

Ultimately, it’s Seth who makes the first move – he gets out of the car, and he laughs. “I can’t believe it’s almost over.”

It’s not. “It’s not,” Neil tries to snarl, soft around his human teeth, and digs his fingernails into the meat of his thigh. This is nowhere _near_ over, not even in the neighborhood of it, because even if the three of them die right here in a deserted lot, there’s still Beacon Hills. There’s still _home_.

A quiet sound reveals itself to be Nicky, appearing in the open door beside him; how he got from the passenger seat to here without Neil’s notice he might never know, but it’s a cold reminder that there’s so much more to this world than he will ever know. That everything he’s encountered has been kindergarten at best. “Hey sunshine,” he smiles when he catches Neil’s attention. He’s called him that since their first full moon together, tugging on the red curls that Neil hasn’t cut since October. His mother had called him that too, once upon a time, and it feels very much to him like a parent should. “You know we’re gonna be right next to you, right?”

He knows.

“No matter what happens in there,” Nicky presses.

And yeah, he knows that too.

Nicky presses a dry kiss to the curls on the top of his head, and hauls him out of the car. “Then let’s fucking get in there.”

They make quick work of the locked gates; two werewolves against iron and rust are laughably capable. It’s harder work, the walk up to the door. There’s something terrible and finite in the silence around them, something looming heavy right at the edge of their awareness – it’s not a threat, not a warning of danger, but a press of _something_ that leaves them with racing hearts and reluctant footsteps. “Oh,” Neil finally exhales as they slide the metal door, well-oiled and recently used, open enough to slip inside. “We are totally gonna die in here.”

The scraps of silver from Neil’s bag scrape rivulets into the palms of his hands, and both of the arms that brush against his feel suddenly larger and furrier than they had; it’s not much, what they have, but they’re preparing for war with the weapons they’ve dragged across countries and back. “Dibs on dying second,” Seth whispers near his shoulder. “I feel like I’ve earned the boring, off-hand death at this point.”

The front room is empty, and long abandoned. Directly across from them, in the wall that would probably lead to the production line, is a singe door with a stripe of light creeping out from beneath it. “Riko’s not here,” Neil realizes suddenly, and wants nothing more than to throw one of the collapsing, forgotten chairs in the dusty corners through a window. “He’s not fucking here.”

“How do you know?” Both wolves take a few breaths through their noses, eyes still shining in the varying colors of the wild coming unchecked, and neither relax. Whatever they smell, it isn’t safety.

Because they’re standing in the first five minutes of every horror movie Neil’s ever watched. Because they weren’t stealthy in their entrance, or even in their drive around town. Because it’s been long enough that he can feel himself starting to hyperventilate and no one has slid from the shadows with sarcasm and threats. Because even if they died here, painfully and slowly, even if their blood painted the walls and the rest of them was fed to the rats, no one they know would ever find out about it, not all the way out here. Because they’re still alive. “I just—” He gestures around at the relative isolation, and the way that they’ve driven so far outside of the downtown area that no one has bothered calling the cops on them. “A guy who leaves a corpse at my school and organs at my house is not the sort of guy looking to hide a body, you know?”

Another deep inhale, and they both stand down. Riko isn’t here.

But _something_ is.

Seventeen somethings – some _ones_ – they learn when they finally open the door to a charnal house. Cages line the walls like a makeshift prison, trapping the tired, tortured bodies within in the false daylight of the hanging florescent lights, and the air is stale and coppery with the stench of old blood and unwashed bodies. None of the people they can see are currently bleeding, but all of them look broken. “Oh Jesus _fuck_ ,” Seth’s immediate response is anger, teeth flashing and snapping against the image, and the two women in the cages closest recoil in terror. “What the _fuck_ is this??”

This is exactly the sort of unfathomable, over the top violence that is all but Riko’s signature. “This,” Neil says quietly, so clearly human, and watches the way that every pair of eyes in the room turn to see him, “is Riko’s pack.”

* * *

They break open all the cages and do what they can for the wolves – all of their eyes are gold, and all of them dip their heads to the floor for even Neil, like the only thing they know how to do is submit – but ultimately, there’s nothing to be done. They curl around each other on the floor and whisper against ears and skin, but every last one of them declines the offer to come with them, or even to leave at all.

“You don’t _understand_ ,” one of them snarls, and snaps her teeth in Neil’s direction; Seth and Nicky are instantly between them, and she yields. Despite the racks of cages and the overwhelming scent of pain and suffering, every last one of them has stayed loyal to Riko’s orders. “He’s our _alpha_ , he _made us_.”

Neil thinks that even if he _were_ a wolf like them, he wouldn’t understand. The alphas he’s met – Kevin, when he remembers himself. Andrew, when he forgets. – are far from perfect, but they’re even farther from cruel. Their pack are their friends, their family, and they would tear the limbs from anyone who even considered doing this to anyone they claim as theirs. “He’s keeping you alive because it makes him stronger,” he snarls back, “and he’s toying with you when he gets bored.”

For a second it looks like there’s still some fight left in her. She meets his stare, eyes blazing, and her lips curls in contempt; he can tell the exact moment she remembers who Neil is, what he is, by the way she tightens her battered and worn body like she’s planning an attack. And then, just as swiftly, she fades. “I know,” her voice is the same grey gravel as the concrete beneath them, dusty and crumbling, “we all know.”

“You don’t have to come with us,” Nicky doesn’t touch her, doesn’t touch any of them, but he leans his warmth as close as they’ll tolerate. “But you can still leave here.”

Another of the wolves, a man this time, tries to laugh and instead chokes on the painful sound of it. “And go where? Riko made us, he _commands_ us. And even if he didn’t, he’d kill our families if we try.”

It sounds exactly like the sort of thing he would do, because it’s exactly the sort of thing that’s led Neil to this place so far from where he belongs. Sometimes, in the nights where he can’t fully sleep because he’s afraid he’ll lose everything if he closes his eyes, he thinks that maybe he started running long before October. Maybe Riko stole the feeling of home from him all the way back on that first night, in the forest, when he promised that there would be nowhere on the planet that would be safe as long as Neil were alive. “I’m sorry,” he tells them, and they must know who he is because the man nods. “I can’t help you.”

The woman, fire in her eyes and steel in her spine, bites her lips nearly to pieces as she shreds the last of the strength from her spirit. “Moriyama,” she spits the word out like the betrayal has already condemned her; it probably has. “Riko Moriyama. They’re looking for him.”

* * *

They leave the warehouse, and Charleston, as quickly as they can.

The silence that fills the space in their car is not comfortable, nor is it kind. It eats the time from them until they’re not sure when or where they are, parked at a rest stop as both wolves gulp for air out the windows they can’t remember opening. They drive in fits and spurts, sometimes just sitting in the small sanctity they have carved out from the rest of the world in their terrible Suburu, and eventually Neil realizes they’re already in Cincinnati.

They find a motel, and they stay for two weeks.

It’s incredulity and hopelessness that bind them in place – disbelief and acceptance at what Riko is capable of, what he intends, and a desperate realization that there’s no way to stop him. Neil has been on the run for nine long months now and this is the first moment he’s allowed himself to really wonder how this all ends. To ask himself what, if anything, he’d planned to accomplish by any of this. “I ran away because I knew he would follow me,” he tells Nicky, and maybe Seth. They both already know. “And as long as I kept running, he would keep chasing. And everyone back home – they would be left alone.”

“You can’t run forever,” Nicky warns. It’s not the first time he’s said this, but it’s the first for quite some time. When they first came to him at the hospital, all of them angry and jagged and tearing at each other still, he’d taunted them with it. _You can’t run forever_ , he’d said to Neil, like maybe someone else could. Someone who wasn’t human, or selfish, or young. Said it again in the hotel room when he’d invited himself along, like maybe he was only joining them because he’d finally found the way he wanted to give up. Again in the forest against the light of the full moon, but this time it was the quiet contemplation of someone who had run for so long that they finally recognized what it looked like in others.

He can’t run forever. He can barely run any more than he already has. “Yeah,” he agrees, and that’s that. Neil finally allows what they’re thinking, what they’ve been thinking these past months, into the room. Thoughts of finality. Inevitability. The defeatism they’ve pounded pavement to escape, running from nearly as much as they have been Riko. In the eerie calm that settles between them, a battle stillness that drowns out the sounds of a city coming to life around them, they finally acknowledge that there’s only one ending this story could have, and they can either prolong it or accept it.

The epiphany is transcendent.

Seth laughs, easy and loose the way he had been back in Colorado, and even Neil feels himself smiling. There’s relief, and a little bit of reluctant excitement – they’re all so _tired_ , so sick to the bone of imagining death at the sunrise of every new morning and pretending they’re above it somehow, of pretending that they haven’t been tiptoeing the minefield to death’s door every damn day. No one escapes death, especially not them. They’ve just managed to arrive fashionably late.

“Well fuck,” Nicky grins, and flops down on the bed to thumb through channels on the television, “I guess we can just stay here until he catches up to us. They have free HBO, and maybe _Game of Thrones_ will give us ideas on how to kill him. Or, you know, get us desensitized to dying painfully. Whichever.” None of them have had time to really care about any shows on their desperate, ill-planned journey, but there’s no time like the present. Seth tucks a pillow under his chin and starts googling the basic plot of _Westworld_ as the opening sequence starts.

Neil promises to join them as soon as he’s finished up with something, an elusive something he doesn’t tell them about because he’s not quite sure what it is. He takes his mother’s binder and the thumbs through the pages, deciphering the languages and codes she’d written it in with increasing familiarity, and he skips to the section on names of allies, or at the very least acquaintances. He tells himself he’s looking for someone local to take them in, find them work, just to pass the time. He knows he’s actually looking for someone to notify his family back home once he’s gone.

The binder is written in a mix of Hebrew characters, Arabic words, and French syntax. It never made sense to him as a child, but the years of pouring over ancient texts and piecing together the stories of monsters from across the globe from the numerous travelers who encountered them had given him a strangely relevant knowledge base. That, and a barely remembered childhood of temple and weekend schoolings, and he’d broken the code somewhere around his senior year of high school. Now, he flips through the pages that would be indecipherable to any one else alive, and he reads them as easily as though they were something else entirely.

His fingers, and his breath, catch on a particular page.

“Hey guys?” he calls softly, warmly, not in warning; he wants their attention from the television, but he doesn’t want their startled, lurching rise from the bed. This is something far too delicate for that. “Not to like, fuck up that final stage of grief we all made our peace with, but there’s an address here for I. Moriyama. He lives in upstate New York.”

* * *

The house is secluded in a way that the old Hemmick home never seemed; they buzz at the gates off the main road – if it can be called that. They left the highway to memories behind them, taking the sort of roads named only with States and Numbers out into the wilderness that should not have been as vast as it was – and announce themselves to the voice that answers, and when they are finally allowed entrance they drive for another twenty minutes through a series of dirt roads. The trees thicken around them, dense like a prison, until they disappear entirely.

It’s a mansion more than it’s a house. The sweeping drive at the front holds the twelve cars it does easily, with room for theirs to pull up to the doors. There’s a lawn, and the hint of an outdoor dining area strung with lights, along the side. The house itself has three floors and sprawls what feels like the length of two city blocks, and they can’t see or hear or even guess where the rest of the state they may have left behind lies at this point.

Two men, wolves by the way they show their teeth, stand large and rigid at either side of the large door. They touch their heads with honest to god earpieces and mutter something, lips barely moving – it’s a trick Neil recognizes well, to keep privacy among pack. One of them, the one that looks slightly less like a nightclub bouncer and slightly more like a mercenary of some kind, holds out a hand the size of a dinner plate when they pull their car to a stop. “Keys,” he orders, “and phones, and any weapons you carry.”

“Jesus Christ,” Seth hands over the shitty drugstore Motorolas they bought back in Colorado all that time ago, and the keys to the car. The ever-increasing collection of keychains that marks out where they’ve been jingles cheerily in the man’s large palm, and his lip twitches once as he tries, and fails, to fold it into his fist. “I feel like I’m in a fucking Bond movie.”

“We don’t have weapons,” Nicky is quick to assure the man, who looks even more like he wants to reflect some form of facial expression that properly conveys how god damn ridiculous he thinks they are. “Weirdly, that never even came up as an idea.”

The door creaks open in perfect tandem to the man’s grunted “Office is first door on the left, he’ll see you now,” that manages to sound far more like derision than it does actual direction.

Neil meets his gaze, holds it, and grins. “Good boy,” he pats the man on his cheek, enjoying the way his lips now twitch against the instinct to snarl, to _attack_ , and then he turns his back to walk into the not nearly as metaphorical as he’d like lion’s den.

* * *

Ichirou is only a little bit older than Nicky, and only a few inches taller than Neil.

Despite both of these, he radiates power in a way that Neil’s never experienced before; both Nicky and Seth nearly drop to their knees just inside the door to the plush, overdone office they’re directed to, and despite being human and completely over the family and nearly the species entirely, Neil keeps his eyes fixed firmly on the floor. “Hmm,” even the voice is powerful, confident in a way that promises the ability to back it up. “A human?”

Ichirou sounds nothing like his brother, except for the way he says _human_ like it’s a stand in for countless other insults – he says it the same way Riko had when he’d expected to kill Neil that night, and again when he thought he’d be easy prey. It’s been years, and he was neither. “I’m the one who’s going to kill your brother,” he says around a smile, and he lifts his gaze to meet Ichirou’s.

His eyes are brown, and then they are red. Finally, they narrow. “And you came here to, what? Ask my blessing?”

Neil shrugs against the weight of whatever it is that lies heavy in the air here, and feels Nicky and Seth step closer into position behind him; they flank him in a show of protection, of deference, that never fails to make him feel as though they’re going to conquer whatever they face. “Just to inform you,” he doesn’t avert his stare, and takes a seat in one of the chairs without being offered. “You know, out of politeness.”

His head cocks to one side, considering. He suddenly seems much older and much larger. “I could stop you.”

“I don’t think you will.” There’s no motion, no command, but they know each other well enough by now that Seth and Nicky are able to pull themselves free long enough to drop into the chairs on either side of Neil in feigned comfort; Seth’s hand rests along the back of Neil’s chair, fingers against his shoulder, and Nicky’s crossed leg rests his foot against Neil’s knee. “In fact, I think you’re going to help me do it.”

Ichirou does not laugh, but it’s a near thing. The five large men who stand at strategic points around the room, each as equally anonymous and deadly as the two outside, have no such reservations. “And why would I do that?”

His eyes are brown again, but his smile is still the threatening pull of a snarl against teeth. “Because,” Neil says easily, and leans forward, “I think that as big a pain in the ass he’s been for me, he’s been a bigger one for you.”

He _hmms_ again. “He is my brother.”

This time, the bark of laughter comes from Neil and, hesitantly, Nicky and Seth. “He’s a much younger beta who got kicked out of the pack and has been killing off alphas for their power. I wonder what his end goal is here,” he shoots a pointed look around the wealthy opulence of the room, the forced tranquility of the grounds. The way that there are children’s toys in the hall and a children’s play structure out the window, but the only inhabitants they’ve seen are grown warriors. “This isn’t a summer home, it’s a sanctuary. A fortress. You’re not all the way out here by choice, this place was your last line of defense.” He tilts his head, the same as the wolf had previously. “You’re running from him as much as we are.”

In a significant, staggering show of regard, Ichirou sits in the chair across the desk; it puts them at nearly the same level. “Very clever, little fox.”

That draws him short. “You know who I am?”

It’s the matter of the same unspoken familiarity that has Ichirou’s pack standing down; two retreat into the hallway, and a third pours some amber-colored drink from the decanter on the side table into the glass Ichirou holds out to him. Nothing is offered to Neil or Seth or Nicky; they wouldn’t accept anyway. “I know you are the thorn in my brother’s side,” he admits around the raised toast of the glass. “And I know you are Mary Hatford’s boy, from Beacon Hills.”

It’s only the way his body goes rigid at the name that alerts Seth and Nicky that this is not some trick. “How do you know that name?” He doesn’t lower his gaze when he asks, but Ichirou looks at him like something pathetic all the same.

“Everyone in this world knows that name,” the thin veneer of human expression parts, showing his teeth. “The Hatfords are one of the oldest surviving families of Hunters, and one of the few who adhere to the Code. They are… well-known and regarded.”

Time does not freeze. The earth does not stop. The years of being only one step away from death do not disappear. But everything changes all the same. “My name is Neil Josten,” he says firmly. At his side, Seth’s hand clenches around his collarbone, grounding him.

“It is,” Ichirou agrees, “as much as it is Nathaniel Wesninski, and also Abram Hatford.” Time does not freeze, but a single universe re-aligns itself. “When I help you kill Riko,” he distances himself with the change in address, and also positioning as he leans back in his chair, “our families will be even. Tell your mother this clears the debt between us.”

Neil curls in his chair like he had the passenger seat of the car, like the bottom bunk of Kevin’s room for nearly three months. Like he’s trying to disappear. Nicky smooths a hand down his arm, murmuring the words he’s probably learned from his years of doctors and therapy. Seth releases his grip, and his tongue, and fixes his gaze at some point around Ichirou’s left shoulder. “Mary Hatford is dead,” he informs politely. Formally. He steps into the position of Neil’s second like it’s something he’s always done, like it’s something they were aware existed.

Genuine emotion breaks the mask of Ichirou’s face, draws lines around his eyes and the corners of his lips as every sharp angle of him purses. “My apologies,” and he bows his head just so, just an inch, but it’s enough. “And my condolences. Your mother was one of the best.” The wolves still remaining in the room lower their chins and their gazes in a gesture of respect that, were Neil fully aware of anything beyond the sound of his mother’s name after a decade, would be remarkable. “Leave the details of the service with my wife on your way out. I would like to send flowers.”

Fury like he’s never known, not through any of this, crawls through his gut like a dying thing – relentless, reckless. He snarls at Ichirou as best as he is able, tugs at the grip Seth and Nicky keep on his arms. “I don’t know when she died,” he growls. He’s never let himself feel his mother’s abandonment before. “Or where. My mother left me at the sheriff’s house the summer before I started sixth grade and I never heard from her again. I didn’t know she was a Hunter, and I damned well didn’t know about this world until it dragged me from my doorstep.”

Ichirou considers the outburst. Considers his words. Considers the hundred and forty pounds of furious human that spits the petulance of childhood it never got to have. He considers, and he accepts. “Mary was here last spring,” he says cautiously. Carefully. Like he knows what people of Neil’s name are capable of, and maybe a little bit Neil himself. “And I owe her my daughter’s life. A child for a child – it’s only fair.”

Neil whites out, and then he doesn’t.

“I will help you kill Riko,” Ichirou says magnanimously, like it’s not just as much in his benefit as it is Neil’s. “And then I will give you the number she left me.” He doesn’t need to specify any more than that; there’s only ever been one _she_ for Neil. The offer feels more like a cruelty than a kindness, like maybe he’s doing it as some form of revenge for the human who has bested his brother, bested him. Or maybe, just maybe, like he knows that sometimes _not_ knowing is worse.

He reaches across the desk and, in a very human gesture, extends his hand.

Neil takes it.

* * *

In a secluded field in the wilds of Maine, Neil Josten stops running.

This time it isn’t the weariness of time or the inevitability of failure. It’s not a decision made from exhaustion or sorrow or fear. Instead of a final stand it is a first attack, planned and premeditated, and when he finally stops running it is not because he can run no more, but because he has decided to himself be caught. In a secluded field in the north of Maine, where the nearest town is about thirty miles away and the nearest city nearly three times as far, in a spot chosen exactly for this purpose, Neil parks his car and digs in his heels, and then he waits.

It’s October again, a full year gone, and it’s snowing; he burrows deeper into the jacket he’d purchased in Montreal the winter before, and stuffs his hands – gloves under mittens – deeper into the pockets as the wind picks up. It’s not the coldest he’s ever felt, but it’s close; there’s ice and water in the wind that seems to find gaps in the molecules of his clothing, slowly oozing into his skin until he feels the damp down in his bones.

He waits.

Beside him, Seth presses closer and leans down to whisper against the fur of his hood how much he hates this. _This_ is the bite of the wind on their cheeks, is the ice the clings to every surface, including their eyelashes, is the way they’ve chosen a clearing rather than the windbreak of the trees – it is not Neil, and it is not their plan. Nicky, at Neil’s other side, presses in a similar fashion until he’s all but enveloped between the larger men; it’s warmer here, at least.

They wait a little bit longer, and then between one flurry of wind and another they’re not alone.

Riko emerges from the forest – slow and hazy, like an illusion, wavering into being with the reluctance of something that might be lost to the wind – looking far worse for wear than Neil would have imagined, hair long and lank against his shoulders and skin pale and drawn against the cold, and the first thing he does is bare his teeth like a feral predator that’s just scented another in their territory.

The others appear behind him, looking equally worn: the large man has lost some of his mass and a good deal of his muscle. The woman with the eyepatch has gained a few stripes of grey in her hair. The younger man has lost whatever youth was about him, as well as whatever aura left him at all menacing. The twins are no longer carrying their baubles, and no longer act in tandem – the female stands to Riko’s right, and the male stands behind them all.

After everything they’ve seen, everywhere they’ve been, Neil and his wolves have come out stronger. Riko and his clearly have not; they look as tired as Neil has felt, as drawn to melancholy and hopelessness. There’s still the spark of madness in Riko’s eyes, the glint of cruelty and promises that keeps him going despite the obvious lack of allies or assets to sustain his revenge quest, but the others no longer stare at him as if he were a god. Somewhere, sometime over the last twelve months, the pack of murderers that had followed him so blindly have begun to open their eyes.

“I guess it’s true,” Riko’s voice is rough and sharp and dangerous, “what they say about foxes.”

He doesn’t know what they say to know if it’s true. All he knows is that, just like last time, Neil refuses to die like this. “Better than what they say about dogs, I guess.”

Riko’s almond-shaped, dried-blood eyes narrow to knife-points, his lips curling just slightly in the direction of a sneer, and though he’s chased them across countries and an entire calendar he has not caught them until they allowed it. “Foxes always run from true predators,” he says the words like a threat, “and they are always caught.”

Foxes are predators too, Neil knows, albeit smaller ones. They hunt alone and they rely on stealth, not speed. Wolves are pack hunters, using strength and numbers to take down prey ten times their size.

Humans though, are a different type of hunter entirely.

It’s the start and end of all of it, that Neil is human – soft and weak and this isn’t his world, has _never_ been his world, and the only thing that’s kept him alive all these years he’s run with wolves is that very simple fact that humans are the ultimate survivors. What they lack in teeth and claws they have carved from the earth into weapons, bigger and brighter and better, inventing new terrible ways to win battles. Adapting to intelligence rather than the environment they infect like a mold, they bend nature itself to their whims. Humans might succumb to inclement weather, but they have also walked on the moon. Wolves hunt foxes, but humans—

Humans hunt wolves.

“All you ever wanted,” Neil meets the rust-blood red of Riko’s gaze and he does not look away, not even when the prick of the wind leaves his eyes stinging like pins against his flesh, “was to lead the Moriyama pack.” He shifts his weight into the warmth of his coat, hands loose and easy in his pockets, and then he grins around his blunt, human teeth. “They’re looking for you,” he echoes the words of the tortured beta, of Elodie, and watches the realization that crests like a wave over the madness in Riko’s stare – that Neil was not the only one who has been running, hunted.

In a secluded field in the wilds of Maine, Neil leans against his car and against the two members of his pack who have followed him to hell and back, and he watches the Moriyama pack and their allies descend from all sides. Ichirou cups his brother’s face in one hand briefly, and then he snaps his neck.

* * *

The ancient, ugly car that has been their constant companion finally gives out when they re-enter Colorado. The mechanic sites a radiator issue, as well as a fan belt, and quotes them well beyond the $900 cash they paid all those months ago for repairs; instead, they sell it for the cost of scrap, a little over a hundred dollars, and they use the money on a trio of bus tickets to Colorado Springs.

“Well,” Seth says slowly. Uncomfortably. He’s finally taken a razor to the mass of coils that had grown on their journey, shearing them down to the fade he’d sported all through high school, and it makes him look sharper. Older. Like a man who never got to be a boy, or a boy trying too hard to be a man. He hasn’t stopped running his hand over his scalp, like even he isn’t used to the sudden emergence of skull and cheekbones from where he’d hidden them. “This is my stop.”

The student apartment building doesn’t look any worse than it had, but it doesn’t look any better either. There’s still the hanging stench of stale weed and old beer in the air, and half of the doors are still propped open for others in the building to come and go like invited guests. At the far end in the top corner, the shuttered few rooms that had been his wait like an unwanted memory. Neil gives in to the temptation of the last seventy-two hours and reaches out a hand to the prickly peach fuzz that now covers most of Seth’s head. “Guess so.”

Nicky drapes his arms over Seth’s shoulders and most of his body along Seth’s back, and whines softly. “Doesn’t feel right,” he ignores the dirty look Seth gives him in favor of pressing his face into his shoulder, “after everything.”

“Fuck you,” Seth snarls without heat. There’s a quiet reluctance to his words, a hesitance, and he hadn’t been the one to suggest their destination at the bus depot. “It’s exactly what feels right after everything. Getting the fuck back to—” And that’s just it. Getting the fuck back to Colorado maybe. The apartment he’d never bothered unpacking. Seth had hidden away out here but he’d never started over, and so he’s coming back to exactly that: a blank slate with nothing to write on it.

Neil hasn’t felt a surge of affection for either of them, Nicky _or_ Seth, in months. Not since that night in the forest, two wolves curled around him like overprotective pillows, or maybe even since that first night in the hotel when Nicky broke out to find them. There hasn’t been a sudden moment of it because it’s been _every_ moment, every day – these two are _his_ , are his in the way he knows he would tear down sociopaths and states to keep, and all he feels for their continued presence at his side is sureness. He grins. “You quitting on me, Gordon?”

In the fragile moment where he genuinely thinks that Seth might say yes, Neil chews his lip to keep from doing something terrifically close to begging. Instead, he waits for the tension that bleeds from Seth’s frame, and for the creeping smile that replaces it. “You’re stuck with me,” he finally agrees, and reaches out to pull Neil into an awkward, one-armed hug.

* * *

Neil comes home thirteen months after he left, on a Sunday. On the three hundred and eighth day of the year. On the fourth of November.

He rents a car at the Sacramento airport and makes the flat, frustrating drive up I-5 at six in the morning, pulling to a stop at a gas station just outside Colusa for a cup of coffee and a quiet moment of panic. “Hey sunshine, you okay to drive?” Nicky leans dangerously out the back window of their rented sedan, waving his arms in wide circles as if he hasn’t had Neil’s attention from the moment he bared his throat and followed Neil into battle. “We’re still like, an hour and a half out.” They talk about the distance in terms of their maps or clocks – Three hours in the air. Two rotations of driving. One hundred miles. They talk about the distance because none of them can bear to talk about the destination:  _home_.

They are going home.

Seth blinks at the cup of coffee that Neil presses into his hands, lips quirking in a small, grateful smile. He’s been uncharacteristically silent since the plane landed, his feelings of unease churning across his face like palpable nausea. It’s different, for him – he’s the only one of them that doesn’t truly belong to Beacon Hills. He doesn’t feel it in the air, feel way the wind shifts its direction north to hasten their return.

He doesn’t belong to Beacon Hills, but he belongs to  _them._

Neil shakes off the concern to keep driving, one hand bridging the distance to stay firmly on Seth’s shoulder, and Nicky drapes himself across the back of the seat with an arm slung across Seth’s chest. He doesn’t stop again until they bridge the city limits, and suddenly everything looks familiar and foreign all at once. He hasn’t been back here in over a year, hasn’t talked to his dad or his pack or anyone nearly as long. The last they heard from him he was alive, yes, but he was on the run – he was being _hunted_. His first stop should be the station, or the house, or maybe even Abby’s.

He drives to Andrew’s instead.

There’s a present in his duffel in the trunk, obnoxious pink birthday paper and a glittery red bow. He’d found the book six months ago at a small shop in St. Louis and it had been at the bottom of his bag ever since; it wasn’t in excellent condition to begin with but it _was_ a first edition, and Neil knew how much he loved Agatha Christie. It’s always been a tradition, the way the pack piles into the home of whoever’s birthday it is like a mess of too many cooks trying to make breakfast in a too tiny kitchen. It’s tradition – they’ll be there.

Neil parks at the edge of the reserve.

It’s easier, he thinks, on all of them if they don’t drive up the access road. Approaching on foot gives them all more time to adjust, to count the number of heartbeats, and maybe – just maybe – come to recognize them. It gives them – gives _Neil_ – time to practice how to breathe.

Not what to say. After thirteen months, what could there possibly be to say?

In the end, it doesn’t matter. He knows that they know who approaches by the way the house at the end of the road hangs suspended in time, still and silent and teeming with life; like the structure itself is holding its breath. Neil gestures for the others to wait at the driveway as he takes the final few yards, taking in the porch light and the lack of presence that reads as more of a welcome than he probably deserves. He doesn’t bother to knock.

When Andrew opens the door, he doesn’t look surprised to see him. Instead, he looks at Neil like  _he’s_  the one who’s finally found his way home.

“Hey, Drew.”

* * *

This is how it ends.

It ends with a hello.


End file.
